The Chinese government announced a new policy in Wuhan Friday to isolate individuals testing positive for the novel coronavirus ravaging the city in what the New York Times is calling “quarantine camps.”
The senior Chinese official tasked with coronavirus response reportedly ordered Wuhan authorities to “set up a 24-hour duty system” to prevent further spread of the deadly coronavirus.
“During these wartime conditions, there must be no deserters,” Sun Chunlan said, “or they will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame forever.”
The city has raced to comply with the order, erecting makeshift “mass quarantine shelters,” including one in a sports stadium, an exhibition center, and a building complex.
Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. It has already been on “lockdown” – a shutdown of public transportation, flights, and most usage of roads in and out of the city – for over a week to prevent the virus from spreading in the rest of the country.
Local officials in Wuhan enacted the lockdown after an estimated five million people had left the city for the Lunar New Year holiday, according to the city’s mayor, so it is not clear if the measures have successfully stopped the virus from spreading. All 31 Chinese provinces have documented coronavirus cases.
According to the New York Times, Wuhan residents on Weibo, the highly censored but legal Chinese social media platform, have denounced the camps as frigid and in “very poor condition.”
Wuhan’s lockdown has already caused a shortage of testing kits, hospital beds, and vital medical supplies. Residents have been forced to walk the streets to reach hospitals, but many have been turned away without so much as a test for the virus ravaging the isolated city.
The building of camps in another region of China may prove alarming to human rights activists that have already been denouncing the Communist Party for years for its use of concentration camps to eliminate the existence of Muslims, particularly ethnic Uyghur Muslims, in far-west Xinjiang province — where coronavirus statistics are a “state secret.” The Pentagon has estimated that as many as three million people are currently trapped in concentration camps in Xinjiang for being Muslims or otherwise threats to the Han supremacist communist state. Survivors have described murder, rape, indoctrination, slavery, forced sterilization, organ harvesting, and other human rights atrocities as taking place in the camps.
A Stunning 400 Million People Are On Lockdown In China As Guangzhou Joins Quarantine
Tyler Durden
Guangzhou, the capital of China's southwestern Guangdong Province and the country's fifth largest city with nearly 15 million residents, has just joined the ranks of cities imposing a mandatory lockdown on all citizens, effectively trapping residents inside their homes, with only limited permission to venture into the outside world to buy essential supplies.
The decision means 3 provinces, 60 cities and 400 million people are now facing China's most-strict level of lockdown as Beijing struggles to contain the coronavirus outbreak as the virus has already spread to more than 2 dozen countries.
That's more than 400 million people forcibly locked inside their homes for 638 deaths? Just think about that: If there was ever a reason to believe that Beijing is lying about the numbers (and not just because Tencent accidentally leaked the real data), this is it.
Breaking: Guangzhou City (population: 14 M) locked down. All residential blocks be isolated from each other. So far around 400 million people locked down in #China to contain #coronavirus. #coronavirusOutbreak Original Chinese official report:https://t.co/emfLIaOLut pic.twitter.com/RmX82iDOEH
— 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 7, 2020Meanwhile, in the US, the Trump Administration has directed researchers to investigate the 'true origins' of the virus, as 'conspiracy theories' and misinformation spreads online. We can't help but wonder: What if the scientists discover something that the regime in Beijing doesn't want them to see?
Elsewhere, Singapore raised its national disease response level to Orange, the second-highest level and the same level from the SARS epidemic, according to the city-state's health ministry. It also confirmed three new coronavirus cases. While investigations are ongoing, none of the three appear to have a history of recent travel to China, suggesting they picked up the virus in Singapore.
'Orange' means the outbreak "is severe and spreads easily from person to person" but "has not spread widely in Singapore and is being contained," according to the Disease Outbreak Response System Condition color-coded framework. Singapore has never invoked its highest level, red, per BBG.
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