City authorities have locked down entire residential areas, imposed a partial travel ban, and advised companies to let employees work from home after a cluster of fresh coronavirus cases emerged last week at a wholesale food market in Beijing.

After struggling through months of closures during the epidemic, many businesses in the service industry have once again been forced to close their doors or reintroduce restrictions.

An outlet of gym chain Break Fitness, in the hard-hit Fengtai district, temporarily shut on Friday after reopening for around a month, with staff undergoing COVID-19 tests.

Store manager Xiao Tianwei said the firm like many others nearby was awaiting instructions on reopening.

“It can’t be helped,” he said.

Some workers have been hit especially hard. Zhang Tong, a personal trainer at another gym, Sculpture Fitness, went largely without income for almost six months.

“Even after we resumed business, I went back for only a couple of days. There aren’t many people,” he said. “Without classes, you don’t receive any salary… The impact is very big.”

Restrictions are spreading beyond the worst-hit districts, with bars in Beijing’s popular Sanlitun area receiving a notice on Tuesday night telling them to “halt operations… with reopening to be determined based on the epidemic situation”.

The notice, seen by AFP, said authorities would carry out “continuous inspection” of closed bars and deal with violators accordingly.

Staff at clothes shops said Wednesday that footfall had dropped by more than half, with one employee at a handbag store saying she had not had a single customer for two days.

A restaurant manager said his earnings had fallen by around half on Sunday, adding that he expected the pause on bar operations to hit business further.

Workers at a shuttered bar were seen wrapping the wire around its outdoor seats on Wednesday to prevent people from sitting down.

Preston Thomas, co-owner of the restaurant The View 3912, previously had to close his restaurant for two months and said he was “still recovering”.

“We have 40 staff and we have rent to pay,” he said. “We are worried but we are going to try to stay open for as long as we can.”

Bai Xue, who works at restaurant Pinzhi Yili, said the number of customers had dropped to a third of previous levels since the recent outbreak.

“The situation is serious and people don’t want to come out,” she added.

The eatery had also stopped selling seafood and put up a notice online telling customers it had not recently sourced food from Xinfadi, the market where the new cluster emerged.

The source of the new outbreak, which has infected more than 150 people, has not been determined but the discovery of the virus on salmon chopping boards has raised concerns about the product’s safety.

Wang Kai, the owner of bar Nina, said he expected few customers this week and stricter checks on imported goods.

With the massive Xinfadi market closed, authorities and retail platforms are scrambling to ensure food supplies to Beijing.

E-commerce giant JD.com said it had stepped up direct procurement for food such as meat and vegetables for its online business, with the current volume “three times that of the daily average”.

Officials in Hebei province, which surrounds the capital, also asked major vegetable-growing counties to prioritize supplies to Beijing, reported the official Xinhua news agency.

As physical shops tighten controls and customers stay away, more people have gone online. Hua Chunguang, deputy store operations manager of a 7Fresh supermarket, said its web orders had risen by more than 20 percent since last week.

Delivery platform Meituan said grocery orders it handles for supermarkets in Beijing had more than tripled since last Saturday compared with a week earlier.

But sellers noted the rush to online shopping was less drastic this time than during the initial outbreak.

Yang Guifang, who runs an outlet of fresh produce store Linlizhijia, said it was limiting the number of in-store customers to ensure the distance between patrons.

Another fresh food vendor, who declined to be named, said fewer people had been out shopping and meat sales had fallen as customers grow wary.

The COVID-19 resurgence — believed to have started at the sprawling Xinfadi wholesale food market in the capital — has sparked alarm as China had largely brought its outbreak under control through mass testing and lockdowns imposed earlier in the year.

The new cases took the number of confirmed infections in Beijing over the past five days to 106, as authorities locked down almost 30 communities in the city and tested tens of thousands of people.

“The epidemic situation in the capital is extremely severe,” Beijing city spokesman Xu Hejian warned at a press conference, AFP reported.

The World Health Organization had already expressed concern about the cluster, pointing to Beijing’s size and connectivity.

Officials in the capital have said they will test stall owners and managers at all of the city’s food markets, restaurants and government canteens.

Beijing’s coronavirus testing capacity has been expanded to 90,000 a day, according to China’s official news agency Xinhua.

On Tuesday, the capital’s transport commission banned taxi- and ride-hailing services from driving out of the city in another move to try and contain the new outbreak.

All indoor sports and entertainment venues in Beijing were ordered to shut on Monday, and some other cities across China warned they would quarantine those arriving from the capital.

The National Health Commission also reported four new domestic infections in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, and a case reported in southwestern Sichuan province was linked to the Beijing cluster.

Authorities were also racing to track people from Beijing who had traveled to other parts of China, and those who visited the capital have been encouraged to get tested.

Beijing spokesman Xu said: “High-risk people who have left Beijing must inform local authorities immediately.”

Authorities shut down another market on Tuesday — Tiantaohonglian in the central Xicheng district — after one employee there was diagnosed with COVID-19, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Seven residential estates surrounding that market were also locked down.

In total, Beijing officials said Tuesday they have disinfected 276 agricultural markets, closed 11 markets, and disinfected more than 33,000 food and beverage businesses in a bid to stamp out the new cluster.

Officials had warned Sunday that since May 30, 200,000 people had visited the Xinfadi market — the original site of the new outbreak.

More than 8,000 workers from Xinfadi have been tested and sent to centralized quarantine facilities.

Until this recent outbreak, most of China’s cases in recent months were nationals returning home as the pandemic spread to other countries.

China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday that the virus strain found in the Beijing outbreak was a “major epidemic strain in the European countries”.

While the virus was detected on chopping boards used to handle imported salmon at Xinfadi, “it does not clearly or definitely indicate it’s from imported seafood”, Wu Zunyou, the body’s chief epidemiologist, said in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV.

“Ever since new cases suddenly emerged in Beijing, we have tried to figure out the reasons for the outbreak since there were no COVID-19 cases found over the past two months,” Wu Zunyou said.

“We came up with several possibilities, and the most likely one is that the carrier of the novel coronavirus comes from outside China or other parts of China and brought it here.”

On Tuesday, another eight imported cases were reported.