Working staff transport daily commodities at the entrance of a residential community under lockdown in Beijing. Photo: VCG

 

A cold chain truck driver and his employer were detained for counterfeiting a negative nucleic acid test report to enter Beijing as the city tightens its entry and exit policy amid sporadic cases. Beijing is currently under pressure to flatten the curve as the Winter Olympics approaches.  

The driver was found with a test report that did not match his identity on Tuesday afternoon. He claimed his employer had sent him the report. The employer was summoned for investigation and confessed that he fabricated the report for the driver.

The two were under administrative detention. 

In a separate case on Sunday, another driver surnamed Diao presented an edited fake nucleic acid report at a highway checkpoint entering Beijing. 

Beijing authorities revealed on Wednesday another case where two men organized 53 residents from Changping district to have a one-day bus tour to neighboring Hebei Province on October 19. The organizer and the bus driver did not check health codes and register information of the 53 tourists. On October 22, one of the 53 tourists who had a travel history to high-risk areas tested positive for COVID-19. 

The police have filed a criminal case to investigate the organizer and the bus driver. 

Since October 17, more than 230 domestically transmitted COVID-19 cases have been discovered in 12 provinces and regions, with about half being found in border region Ejin Banner in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The epidemic is turning out to be very complex and involving many trans-regional tour groups -- prompting six provinces and regions to halt cross-region tourism. 

Compared to a previous resurgence centering around the Nanjing airport, transmission of the latest resurgence has been faster while registered cases were similar. The Nanjing-centered epidemic ended in 37 days. Experts predicted more cases will be discovered in the following days amid the massive screening and quarantine of close contacts. 

Global Times