Emergency alert! China raised its emergency warning to its second-highest level and canceled more than 60% of the flights to Beijing on Wednesday amid a new coronavirus outbreak in the capital. This will be a sharp pullback for the nation that declared victory over the virus in March and a warning for the rest of the world about how tenacious this virus really is.
New infections spiked in India, Iran, and US states including Florida, Texas, and Arizona as authorities struggled to balance restarting economic activity without accelerating the spread of the pandemic.
“This has truly rung an alarm bell for us,” Party Secretary Cai Qi told a meeting of Beijing’s Communist Party Standing Committee.
The party’s Global Times said 1,255 flights to and from the capital’s two major airports were scrapped by Wednesday morning, about two-thirds of those scheduled. Beijing Capital Airport is traditionally the world’s second busiest in passenger capacity.
Since the virus emerged in China late last year and spread worldwide, there have been more than 8.1 million confirmed cases and at least 443,000 deaths, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. Experts say the true toll is much higher, due to the many who died without being tested and other factors.
The US has the most infections and deaths in the world, with a toll that neared 117,000 on Wednesday, surpassing the number of Americans who died in World War I. In a worrying development since the US hurricane season began this month, the virus has even sidelined some members of a US team that tracks hurricanes.
India — which has the fourth-highest caseload after the US, Brazil, and Russia — added more than 2,000 deaths to its tally, after Delhi and Maharashtra states included 1,672 previously unreported fatalities. Its death toll of 11,903 is now the eighth highest in the world. India has been reporting some 10,000 new infections and more than 300 deaths each day for the last two weeks.
