(Bloomberg) -- On the outskirts of Lu village near Wuzhou, relatives are getting desperate. It’s been almost a week since flight MU5735’s sickening vertical drop from the skies above China’s Guangxi region, and still there are so many unanswered questions.

A manifest of the 123 passengers and nine crew aboard the China Eastern Airlines Corp. has yet to be released for privacy reasons, the jet’s flight data recorder hasn’t been found and officials haven’t ruled out the possibility that the Boeing Co. 737-800 NG’s cockpit voice recorder, retrieved Wednesday and sent to Beijing for decoding, was badly damaged upon impact.

One, who declined to give his name, said he’s been waiting for days -- police have set up a checkpoint on a road about 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside of downtown Wuzhou near the crash site, restricting public access. Only cars with the right government license plates can get in.

Officials did organize one visit, but only after family members pleaded relentlessly to pay their respects.

“If they have died, we want to see the body,” the father of Zhang Xu, an 18-year-old university student who was on the flight, told local media. “It’s sad. I’m really sad. My wife told me to bring something back to remember our son by,” he said as tears flowed.

The job for foreign media covering the tragedy isn’t easy either. Covid protocols mean journalists need to take swab tests at least daily and scan numerous health codes as they move about the city. A tour of the site for reporters on Friday visited an area about two kilometers from the crater made by the crash. The message: China is doing everything it can to get to the bottom of the disaster.

Attendees were supplied red gum boots and led into the heavily thicketed area, dense with bamboo and ferns, as a press conference taking place concurrently in Wuzhou revealed 18 finger-print samples had been found.

State-run media outlet Xinhua has been broadcasting a live stream on Weibo of the recovery efforts, intermittently. Hundreds of people dressed in white protective gear can be seen combing the scene, shoveling mud and picking up debris for bagging. On Thursday, after heavy rain earlier in the week, the ground was so wet firefighters had to link arms to keep from slipping over.

Outside of the crash-site entrance, largely closed off with blue hoardings, locals aren’t much more enlightened.

“I haven’t seen this kind of situation in my life. It’s usually very quiet here in this small village,” said a grocery store owner surnamed Liu, whose small shop is right outside along the road. He heard the loud noise from the crash on Monday afternoon and saw rescue teams, security and police start to rush by and up into the mountains within the hour.

All the attention has left other villagers bemused. “What’s going on in there,” asked one on Friday. “Why are there so many people?”

One local photographer summed it up. “When so many foreign journalists piled into our small county amid the rain and storm on Tuesday, villagers didn’t even know the biggest news in the country had happened, right here.”

©2022 Bloomberg L.P