A report at the Epoch Times on Tuesday said that despite the much-ballyhooed grand reopening of Wuhan, the city at the heart of the coronavirus pandemic, and the confident proclamations of Chinese officials that the virus has been all but exterminated, quarantines are being quietly reimposed on residential compounds as new infections spread.

Thousands flooded out of Wuhan last week by car, rail, and air after officials ceremonially lifted the lockdown order and pronounced the surrounding Hubei province to be coronavirus-free. However, residents of both Hubei and its neighboring provinces surreptitiously told foreign media that they did not trust the Chinese Communist Party’s declarations of victory over the virus.

According to the Epoch Times, the locals are now saying that only travel for work has been approved by the government, contrary to the big show of a mass exodus of happy travelers last week. Residents reported a brutal extrajudicial police force likened to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo still hard at work abusing suspected virus victims and “entire residential compounds … locked down with each new case of infection.”

The official line from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is that no local infections are occurring, but foreign travelers and workers are bringing the coronavirus back to China, notably including Russians and the large African communities in certain Chinese cities. Cases of serious racial discrimination against these foreign populations have been documented.

Another Epoch Times report quoted workers brought to Wuhan to construct its celebrated “instant hospitals,” clinics built in a matter of weeks to handle coronavirus patients at the height of the outbreak. The workers said that instead of being thanked for their heroic efforts, they were paid a pittance, treated like “prisoners,” and herded into quarantine centers when the work was done. They even had to pay for their own coronavirus tests.

When a worker named Zhang Xiongjun and a few of his colleagues returned to Wuhan last week to file grievances with local officials, they were treated even more poorly:

They drove to the provincial petition office located in Wuhan and planned to lodged complaints with government authorities about their compensation. But before they were able to, around two dozen people from the China Construction Third Engineering Bureau surrounded them and ordered them to squat down on the ground. Zhang said he wasn’t sure how the company caught wind of their plans, but for the next nine hours, they intimidated Zhang and his group, denying them access to meals or water. One person fainted under the scorching sun. The company pressured them to sign a letter promising to never mention anything about the incident or their involvement in building Leishenshan [the hospital]. Company staff also demanded that they erase any photos or videos from their phones that proved they worked on Leishenshan. They were ordered to leave Wuhan. Because the group had been to Wuhan, where the outbreak is still severe, no nearby hotels were willing to accommodate them. So they slept in the car. For days, “we were either chased, turned away, or taken to quarantine,” he wrote. “We are merely refugees now.” They could not find new construction jobs either.

Note that Zhang and his friends were hustled back into quarantine at the very moment when the CCP was telling the world it had the coronavirus on the ropes and the only infections left in all of China were brought from overseas by travelers. Another laborer who traveled to Wuhan for emergency work on coronavirus hospitals said he was kept in quarantine for a full month, then thrown into quarantine for another two weeks when he passed through the city of Shenzhen on his way home.