China Halts Travel in Northern City as Coronavirus Fiasco Continues

The Chinese city of Manzhouli, located in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region along the Russian border, on Monday announced the suspension of all plane, train, bus, and taxi travel – ostensibly because 60 positive coronavirus tests came back after a round of city-wide nucleic acid testing.

China’s state-run Global Times reported that the Communist Party ordered mass testing on Saturday because 28 coronavirus cases were detected during the current coronavirus outbreak.

When 60 positive test results came back, the city imposed round-the-clock inspections at every travel checkpoint and banned residents other than medical and delivery personnel from leaving town.

Manzhouli is an important “land port,” a city through which a great deal of railroad and truck traffic passes. Locking these cities down completely would severely disrupt regional travel and shipping.

“Of the outbreaks reported in China over the past few months, several have been associated with land border cities. The two main threads of the recent wave started in Ejin Banner in Inner Mongolia and Heihe, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, both land border ports with cross-border trade, or where migrating wild animals could cross the border,” the Global Times noted.

China’s National Health Commission announced on Tuesday that it would halt non-container commodity imports by rail in several outbreak cities, including Manzhouli. Non-container commodities include coal, fertilizer, and other goods transported in bulk that require extensive human interaction to load and unload.

The focus on border cities in Chinese state media coverage helps perpetuate the narrative that all of these coronavirus outbreaks are caused by foreign sources. The draconian responses taken by Chinese municipalities are incongruous with the extremely small number of coronavirus infections and positive tests officially reported by Chinese officials.

Despite these heavy-handed measures taken in cities that supposedly only have a few dozen potential coronavirus infections to worry about, China’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confidently predicted on Tuesday that Chinese vaccines will be effective in controlling the latest outbreak, even if it includes the much-discussed Omicron variant.

Chinese vaccines have proven questionable when used anywhere the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cannot control the data on their effectiveness, leading some foreign customers to stop using them, and the manufacturers of more reliable vaccines have expressed concerns about how much protection they can offer against Omicron without modifications.

Cities like Manzhouli have not divulged how many of their coronavirus cases involve the Omicron variant, but China’s CDC claimed its existing test kits can reliably detect the new mutation.

On Sunday, China’s CDC published a report prepared by Peking University mathematicians that predicted an explosion of over 630,000 coronavirus infections per day if China relaxes its restrictions on foreign travel.

More specifically, and in keeping with the communists’ dubious claim to have utterly conquered the Chinese coronavirus, the report claimed China would suffer up to 630,000 new cases a day if it abandoned its flawless pandemic protocols and adopted the policies embraced by the United States, Europe, or Israel.

“Our findings have raised a clear warning that, for the time being, we are not ready to embrace ‘open-up’ strategies resting solely on the hypothesis of herd immunity induced by vaccination advocated by certain western countries,” the mathematicians said.