The story of a migrant worker in Beijing who caught COVID-19 while searching for his missing son provoked shock and sympathy on social media on Jan. 20, and drew attention to the hardships faced by the floating populations in China’s big cities. On Wednesday, city officials said that an asymptomatic case of the novel coronavirus had been detected in a 44-year-old man they identified by his surname Yue in the affluent Chaoyang district. His frequent and wide-ranging movements around the city, at odd hours, were widely discussed online. Social media users declared Yue the “hardest-working person among the floating population”—a hashtag that amassed over 60 million views on Twitter-like Weibo, and drew attention to the deep inequality in China given that last year the communist regime called for achieving “common prosperity.” In interviews with local media, the former fisherman from central China’s Henan province said that he had arrived in Beijing …