Authorities in Wuhan, China, yesterday reversed a decision that would have allowed some people to leave the quarantined city at the center of the COVID-19 outbreak, reprimanding the officials who had made the announcement.
The city government in a statement said that a previous announcement had been made by a traffic prevention and control group “without the consent” of the local leadership.
“The announcement is declared invalid. In this regard, we have seriously dealt with the relevant personnel,” the city government said on a microblogging site.
Photo: AFP
“Wuhan resolutely implements the spirit of General Secretary [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s (習近平) important instructions on ‘preventing leaks (of the virus)’ ... strictly manages the passages leaving from Wuhan, strictly controls personnel, and strictly prevents the epidemic from going out,” it wrote.
The city government deleted the previous post that had announced the easing of restrictions barely three hours earlier.
Wuhan officials were already under fire for their handling of the outbreak — accused of initially covering it up, botching the response and causing confusion by changing the criteria for counting the number of cases.
Top Chinese Communist Party officials in Hubei Province and its capital, Wuhan, were sacked earlier this month, along with the region’s top health officials.
The city of 11 million has been under lockdown since Jan. 23 after authorities shut down transport links in the city in an effort to contain the coronavirus outbreak.
The now-scrapped decision would have allowed non-residents to leave if they show no symptoms of the coronavirus and had never had contact with patients, the deleted statement said.
People with special reasons to leave the city, including those who needed treatment for other medical conditions and those doing epidemic prevention work, would also have been allowed to leave.
The statement had said that departures would be staggered and people would have had to apply for permission from local authorities.
Once travelers reached their destination outside Wuhan, they would have had to report themselves to local authorities and monitor their health for 14 days.
The announcement would have also allowed people to enter the city for epidemic prevention or other production-related reasons or if they were Wuhan residents who had previously been unable to return home.
All but 11 of China’s 409 new cases yesterday were reported in Hubei Province. Wuhan reported 348 new coronavirus cases.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS