Washington: China’s notorious ‘wet markets’ have reopened — selling bats, pangolins and dogs for human consumption.
The move is dangerous as scientists believe that the Covid-19 causing coronavirus first lurked in a bat in China and hopped to another animal, before getting passed on to humans.
Various reports suggest that a 55-year-old man from China’s Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted Covid-19 through one such ‘wet market’.
“The markets have gone back to operating in exactly the same way as they did before coronavirus,” Washington Examiner quoted a correspondent of ‘A Mail on Sunday’ as saying.
However, the markets are under watchful eyes of guards, who ensure no one is able to take pictures of the blood-soaked floors, slaughtering of dogs and rabbits, and scared animals cramped in cages.
Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is believed to be the epicentre of coronavirus, which swept the world, engulfing millions as far as the United States and killing nearly 38,000 people.
Four months on, the pandemic seems to be far from over even as Beijing celebrates victory over coronavirus with no vaccination insight for the pathogen, which many people worldwide call Wuhan virus or Chinese virus.
Several scientists, medical experts and animal rights activists have called for a ban on China’s wet markets but the Asian country seems to have not leant from its mistakes. (ANI)
‘Zero’ becomes Xi’s new narrative of cases
Beijing: All countries around the globe today are reeling under coronavirus, with at least seven lakh people being infected and over 37,000 deaths due to the highly contagious bug. But China, among all the others, is the only one to have announced that no new cases of the infection have been reported since last week.
Catholic Answers Forum, a non-profit organisation, in one of its report, titled “China Is Pushing a ‘Zero’ Myth on COVID-19,” said that “Zero” — the goal of reducing the number of cases of the novel coronavirus to zero, officially known as COVID-19 and believed to have originated in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province in central China –has become a new narrative of President Xi Jinping.
“Reaching ‘zero’ is crucial to achieving his broader goal of global leadership and domination,” the report said. It added, “Xi must show the world that the totalitarian Chinese political system is vindicated by the defeat of the virus. The truth about COVID-19 inside China is the greatest obstacle to his ambition.”
In order to hide the actual figures, China has also expelled reporters working for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
The ‘Zero campaign’ depends on censorship and makes it “a universal political obligation for Chinese citizens to collectively deny their own public-health crisis.” That China’s health statistics are manipulated for the Communist Party’s political benefit is not news, the report said. (ANI)
