now China's decision to lock down the
city of Wuhan the epicenter of the
covert 19 outbreak may have prevented
more than 700,000 new cases that's
according to research published today in
the journal Science restrictions in
China are being eased although
international visitors are currently
banned from entering the country our
correspondent in Beijing Stephen
McDonald explained the significance of
these estimated figures the only thing
that we can kind of see is the trend and
some people would some analysts would
say don't look so much at the numbers in
China but look at the government
decisions well I'm standing above the
second ring road in Beijing we might
apply the second ring road index if you
like where you can see cars are still
coming through here it looks like that
they're flowing well reasonably well but
the thing is because they're flowing
it's not the slow-moving traffic the
almost gridlock we would usually expect
here so you can kind of see how we're
heading back towards normal here in
Beijing but not all the way if you know
what I mean and that again would seem to
indicate that the authorities are pretty
confident that they have this under
control
however Xi Jinping has said today that
sure companies should be going back to
work cautiously but in people's free
time they still they still should be
exercising this kind of social
distancing so according to China's
president don't go to the movies watch a
film at home on them you know in the
lounge with your family he said to
restaurants they should be capping the
number of diners at any particular time
to try and again minimize the social
interaction here because they're worried
that as people come in from overseas
we're getting these infections in in the
form of overseas arrivals that could be
a new spike in cases here I mean today
there was a case of a student a Chinese
student who's coming from the UK
returned to Wuhan would you believe
where this all started and is tested
positive so even in the city where this
crisis began there's the potential for a
new spike in cases in the form of
overseas arrivals
Steve McDonald report