Nearly 5,800 people suspected of committing criminal offenses related to Covid-19, such as fraud or even homicides, have been arrested in China since January, the national prosecutor’s office said.
Some are accused of having organized deceptive fundraisers, sales of defective medical equipment, of having made false statements about their state of health or of having concealed their movements.
But other cases are more serious.
One individual is, for example, suspected of having struck to death a customer of a supermarket who asked him to wear a mask, another of having deliberately struck medical personnel with his car, and a third of having killed a agent during a temperature control.
“From January to July, 5,797 people were arrested and 6,755 were prosecuted,” the Supreme People’s Procuratorate said on its website on Thursday.
The statement does not specify how many people are still in detention or whether any have already been sentenced.
The new coronavirus was detected for the first time in China at the end of December 2019 in the large city of Wuhan (center). Since then, the authorities have launched a large-scale campaign to stem the spread of Covid-19.
It materialized in various ways: strict confinement of neighborhoods or cities, temperature control, 14-day quarantine on arrival in the country, or even monitoring of residents by geolocation or travel history in order to quickly identify the sick.
The wearing of the mask is compulsory in supermarkets, cinemas and other closed places, but the majority of Chinese also choose to wear it outdoors for fear of potential contamination.
China has now largely contained the disease on its territory. She has not reported in recent days of any new cases of local origin.