US confirms 1,069,534 coronavirus cases, death toll at 63,001

Beijing, Jun 17: Beijing's airports cancelled more than 1,200 flights and schools in the Chinese capital were closed again on Wednesday as authorities rushed to contain a new coronavirus outbreak linked to a wholesale food market.

The city reported 31 new cases on Wednesday while officials urged residents not to leave Beijing, with fears growing about a second wave of infections in China, which had largely brought its outbreak under control.

Tens of thousands of people linked to the new Beijing virus cluster -- believed to have started in the sprawling Xinfadi wholesale food market -- are being tested, with almost 30 residential compounds in the city now under lockdown.

At least 1,255 scheduled flights were cancelled Wednesday morning, state-run People's Daily reported, nearly 70 percent of all trips to and from Beijing's main airports.

The outbreak had already forced authorities to announce a travel ban for residents of "medium- or high-risk" areas of the city, while requiring other residents to take nucleic acid tests in order to leave Beijing.

Meanwhile, several provinces were quarantining travellers from Beijing, where all schools -- which had mostly reopened -- have been ordered to close again and return to online classes.

"The epidemic situation in the capital is extremely severe," Beijing city spokesman Xu Hejian warned Tuesday.

Mass testing under way

Officials have closed 11 markets and disinfected thousands of food and beverage businesses in Beijing after the outbreak was detected.

The city has now reported 137 infections over the last six days, with six new asymptomatic cases and three suspected cases on Wednesday, according to the municipal health commission.

An additional two domestic cases, one in neighbouring Hebei province and another in Zhejiang, were reported by national authorities on Wednesday, while there were 11 imported cases.

Authorities have so far banned group sports, ordered people to wear masks in crowded enclosed spaces, and suspended inter-provincial group tours in response to the outbreak.

Officials said that since May 30, more than 200,000 people had visited Xinfadi market, which supplies more than 70 percent of Beijing's fruit and vegetables.

More than 8,000 workers there were tested and quarantined.

Until the new outbreak, most of China's recent cases were nationals returning from abroad as COVID-19 spread globally, and the government had all but declared victory against the disease.

China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that the virus type found in the Beijing outbreak was a "major epidemic strain" in Europe.

Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are joining the anti-racism demonstrations days after the killing of George Floyd in United Sates. 

The protests are being held in cities including London, Manchester, Cardiff, Leicester and Sheffield.

Demonstrators attached ropes to the statue of Edward Colston before pulling it down to cheers and roars of approval from the crowd. Images on social media show the statue was eventually rolled into the city's harbour. 

It was not the only statue targeted on Sunday. In Brussels, protesters clambered onto the statue of former King Leopold II and chanted "reparations".

The word "shame" was also graffitied on the monument, reference perhaps to the fact that Leopold is said to have reigned over the mass death of 10 million Congolese.

In London, thousands of people congregated around the US embassy for the second day running.

While protests were mainly peaceful, there were some scuffles near the office of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and outside the Parliament gates.

In Hong Kong, about 20 people staged a rally in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement on Sunday outside the US consulate in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

"It's a global issue," Quinland Anderson, a 28-year-old British citizen living in Hong Kong, told The Associated Press news agency.

"We have to remind ourselves despite all we see going on in the US and in the other parts of the world, Black lives do indeed matter."

Several dozen demonstrators took part in a Black Lives Matter protest held in Tel Aviv's central Rabin Square.

A rally in Rome's sprawling People's Square was noisy but peaceful, with the majority of protesters wearing masks to protect against coronavirus. Participants listened to speeches and held up handmade placards saying "Black Lives Matter" and "It's a White Problem".

In Spain, several thousand people gathered on the streets of Barcelona and at the US embassy in Madrid.

Many in Madrid carried homemade signs reading "Black Lives Matter", "Human rights for all" and "Silence is pro-racist".

"We are not only doing this for our brother George Floyd," said Thimbo Samb, a spokesman for the group that organised the events in Spain mainly through social media. "Here in Europe, in Spain, where we live, we work, we sleep and pay taxes, we also suffer racism."

Beijing, Feb 24: The lockdown of Guo Jing's neighbourhood in Wuhan -- the city at the heart of China's new coronavirus epidemic -- came suddenly and without warning.

Unable to go out, the 29-year-old is now sealed inside her compound where she has to depend on online group-buying services to get food.

"Living for at least another month isn't an issue," Guo told news agency, explaining that she had her own stash of pickled vegetables and salted eggs.

But what scares her most is the lack of control -- first, the entire city was sealed off, and then residents were limited to exiting their compound once every three days.

Now even that has been taken away.

Guo is among some 11 million residents in Wuhan, a city in central Hubei province that has been under effective quarantine since January 23 as Chinese authorities race to contain the epidemic.

Since then, its people have faced a number of tightening controls over daily life as the death toll from the virus swelled to over 2,500 in China alone.

But the new rules this month barring residents from leaving their neighbourhoods are the most restrictive yet -- and for some, threaten their livelihoods.

"I still don't know where to buy things once we've finished eating what we have at home," said Pan Hongsheng, who lives with his wife and two children.

Some neighbourhoods have organised group-buying services, where supermarkets deliver orders in bulk.

But in Pan's community, "no one cares".

"The three-year-old doesn't even have any milk powder left," Pan told news agency, adding that he has been unable to send medicine to his in-laws -- both in their eighties -- as they live in a different area.

"I feel like a refugee."

The "closed management of neighbourhoods is bound to bring some inconvenience to the lives of the people", Qian Yuankun, vice secretary of Hubei's Communist Party committee, said at a press briefing last week.

Authorities on Monday allowed healthy non-residents of the city to leave if they never had contact with patients, but restrictions remained on those who live in Wuhan.

Demand for group-buying food delivery services has rocketed with the new restrictions, with supermarkets and neighbourhood committees scrambling to fill orders.

Most group-buying services operate through Chinese messaging app WeChat, which has ad-hoc chat groups for meat, vegetables, milk -- even "hot dry noodles", a famous Wuhan dish.

More sophisticated shops and compounds have their own mini-app inside WeChat, where residents can choose packages priced by weight before orders are sent in bulk to grocery stores.

In Guo's neighbourhood, for instance, a 6.5-kilogramme (14.3-pound) set of five vegetables, including potatoes and baby cabbage, costs 50 yuan ($7.11).

"You have no way to choose what you like to eat," Guo said. "You cannot have personal preferences anymore."

The group-buying model is also more difficult for smaller communities to adopt, as supermarkets have minimum order requirements for delivery.

"To be honest, there's nothing we can do," said Yang Nan, manager of Lao Cun Zhang supermarket, which requires a minimum of 30 orders.

"We only have four cars," she said, explaining that the store did not have the staff to handle smaller orders.

Another supermarket told AFP it capped its daily delivery load to 1,000 orders per day.

"Hiring staff is difficult," said Wang Xiuwen, who works at the store's logistics division, adding that they are wary about hiring too many outsiders for fear of infection.

Closing off communities has split the city into silos, with different neighbourhoods rolling out controls of varying intensity.

In some compounds, residents have easier access to food -- albeit a smaller selection than normal -- and one woman said her family pays delivery drivers to run grocery errands.

Her compound has not been sealed off either, the 24-year-old told AFP under condition of anonymity, though they are limited to one person leaving at a time.

Some districts have implemented their own rules, such as prohibiting supermarkets from selling to individuals, forcing neighbourhoods to buy in bulk or not at all.

"In the neighbourhood where I live, the reality is really terrible," said David Dai, who is based on the outskirts of Wuhan.

Though his apartment complex has organised group-buying, Dai said residents were unhappy with price and quality.

"A lot of tomatoes, a lot of onions -- they were already rotten," he told , estimating over a third of the food had to be thrown away.

His family must "totally depend" on themselves, added the 49-year-old, who has resorted to saving and drying turnip skins to add nutrients to future meals.

The uncertainty of not knowing when the controls will be lifted is also frustrating, said Ma Chen, a man in his 30s who lives alone.

"I have no way of knowing how much (food) I should buy."