A Chinese SWAT team was filmed tackling people while practicing how to deal with an uncooperative coronavirus-infected patient.
In video footage of the event staged in the Henan province, a man wearing a mask drives up to a COVID-19 checkpoint.
“Please get out of the vehicle to cooperate with our examination,” an official can be heard saying, according to a Storyful translation of the dialogue.
As the man steps out from his car, officers holding firearms and wearing hazmat suits approach him. Some, who don’t get close to the potential coronavirus patient, are simply wearing police officer uniforms.
From behind, one of the SWAT team members throws what appears to be a fishing net over the man’s head in an effort to restrain him.
An official holding a riot shield approaches as they drag the restrained man away, who now has a black bag covering his head.
Immediately after, the officials are sprayed down by what appears to be an antiseptic.
According to Sky News, the footage was posted on Weibo and then shared on TikTok by a local security bureau.
“To win the epidemic defense, Tongyang police had armed exercises,” the Weibo post caption reads.
The province that borders on Hubei, the epicentre of the COVID-19 virus outbreak, is on high alert. As such, they’re taking extreme precautions to limit transmission.
The first case of coronavirus was found in Wuhan, in the Hubei province. Since then, China’s death toll has reached 2,442 as of Saturday.
By Monday, more than 79,000 cases of coronavirus had been confirmed, the vast majority in mainland China, Johns Hopkins CSSE reports.
Ontario so far has seen four confirmed cases of COVID-19, with a total of 10 reported in Canada.
An outbreak of COVID-19 aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was docked in Yokohama, Japan, saw 47 Canadians infected.
Around 600 passengers left the cruise ship last Wednesday as the two-week quarantine finally wound down.
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