Coronavirus: China fears new COVID-19 ripple will lead to second wave
Beijing isn't in full lockdown, at least not yet.
But the new outbreak here has residents - and the Chinese Communist Party - worried.
Today the authorities confirmed another 21 locally transmitted cases of
COVID-19 in the capital, bringing the total in the latest cluster to 158. And they are not confined just to Beijing - cases have been recorded in provinces across China.
The first question is how this happened. Life in China had been getting back to normal, with people going back to work and restaurants reopening.
But the country still had some of the strictest
COVID-19 measures in place. Foreigners are still banned from entering the country, with some very limited exceptions.
Entry to apartment blocks and shops requires scanning a QR code on your phone, to harvest your location history. Masks and temperature checks are ubiquitous.
And yet here we are. Its exact origins remain a mystery, despite China's claims that this is a European strain of the virus. China has sequenced the genome but - shock, horror - has not made it public, so it is impossible for the outside world to know.
In the meantime, the full might of the Chinese state has been brought to bear. More than 350,000 tests were carried out in four days.
Contacts have been traced extensively. Several residential compounds have been sealed off. And all schools have been shut, bars ordered to close and flights in and out of the capital curbed. "Wartime measures" as one local official put it.