https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...break-travel-restricted-china-severe-measures
The outbreak is the most significant in China since February, prompting fears of a second wave and questions over how the virus was able to spread given severe quarantine measures taken by authorities. The outbreak is potentially embarrassing for Beijing, which had declared victory over the virus and ordered citizens back to work.
The capital, where measures were among the strictest in the country, had reported no new locally transmitted cases for 56 consecutive days before a cluster of diagnoses began on Thursday. Before that most new cases had come from Chinese nationals returning from abroad.
On Tuesday, state media appeared to push the idea that the virus had come from abroad. Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said the strain was most similar to those seen in Europe, the US or Russia.
“It clearly indicates the virus strain is different from what it was two months ago,” he told state broadcaster CGTN. “The virus strain is the major epidemic strain in European countries. So it is from outside China brought to Beijing.”
In a similar vein, a deputy director at the pathogen biology department at Wuhan University, told state media he believed the new outbreak involved a more contagious strain of the virus than the one that hit Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic.


