China celebrates first day of “chun yun” despite COVID
2023.01.07 09:38
China celebrates first day of “chun yun” despite COVID
Budrigannews.com – China began the 40-day Lunar New Year travel period known as “chun yun” on Saturday, anticipating a significant increase in travelers and the spread of COVID-19 infections. Prior to the pandemic, this period was the largest annual migration of people in the world.
This Lunar New Year public holiday—which officially begins on January 21—will be the first since 2020 without restrictions on domestic travel.
After historic protests against a policy that included frequent testing, restricted movement, mass lockdowns, and significant damage to the world’s second-largest economy, China has seen the dramatic dismantling of its “zero-COVID” regime over the course of the past month.
Investors are hoping that the reopening will eventually help the $17 trillion economy, which is growing at its slowest rate in nearly 50 years.
However, the sudden shifts have brought the virus to a significant portion of China’s 1.4 billion people for the first time. This has sparked a wave of infections that has overwhelmed some hospitals, emptied pharmacy shelves of medicines, and caused long lines at crematoriums.
Over the next 40 days, the Ministry of Transport anticipates that more than 2 billion passengers will travel, up 99.5% year-over-year and accounting for 70.3% of all trips in 2019.
That news received mixed online reactions, with some praising the freedom to return to one’s hometown and spend the Lunar New Year with family for the first time in a long time.
However, many others stated that they would not travel this year due to the fear of infecting elderly relatives.
One such comment was made on the Weibo (NASDAQ:), which is similar to Twitter. “I dare not go back to my hometown, for fear of bringing the poison back,” it read.
There are a lot of concerns that the large number of workers moving back to their hometowns will lead to an increase in infections in rural and smaller towns that don’t have as many ICU beds or ventilators to deal with them.
According to the authorities, they are expanding rural fever clinics, expanding grassroots medical services, and establishing a “green channel” for high-risk patients, particularly elderly people with underlying health conditions, to be transferred directly from villages to higher-level hospitals.
Mi Feng, a spokesperson for the National Health Commission, stated on Saturday that “China’s rural areas are wide, the population is large, and the per capita medical resources are relatively insufficient.”
“It is necessary to provide convenient services, speed up the vaccination of elderly people in rural areas, and build grassroots defense lines,”
The current wave of infections may have already reached its peak, according to some analysts.
According to Ernan Cui, an analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing, “not much difference between urban and rural areas” indicates that rural areas are already more susceptible to COVID infections than previously thought, with an infection peak already reached in most regions.
China will reopen its border with Hong Kong on Sunday and eliminate the quarantine requirement for international travelers. That effectively allows many Chinese to travel abroad for the first time since borders were closed nearly three years ago without having to worry about being quarantined when they return.
Jillian Xin, who has three children and lives in Hong Kong, stated that she was “incredibly excited” about the opening of the border, particularly because it will make it easier for her to visit family in Beijing.
She stated, “The border opening means for us that my kids can finally meet their grandparents for the first time since the pandemic began.” We cannot wait for them to meet because two of our children have never been able to see their grandfather.
More than a dozen nations are now requiring COVID tests from travelers from China due to concerns raised by the country’s rise in cases. China’s COVID data, according to the World Health Organization on Wednesday, underrepresent the disease’s hospitalizations and deaths.
The handling of the outbreak has been defended by Chinese officials and state media, who have criticized the requirement for residents to travel abroad and downplayed the scale of the outbreak.
People who had scheduled appointments had to wait about 90 minutes at a center in Hong Kong on Saturday to get the PCR tests they needed to travel to countries like mainland China.
China spent a lot of money during the pandemic on a huge PCR testing program to find and track COVID-19 cases, but now the focus is on vaccines and treatments.
For instance, the city government of Shanghai announced on Friday that residents will no longer receive free PCR tests beginning on January 8.
A plan for public finances to subsidise sixty percent of treatment costs until March 31 was outlined in a circular that was published on Saturday by four government ministries. This circular indicated a reallocation of financial resources to treatment.
In the meantime, sources informed Reuters that China is negotiating with Pfizer Inc. to obtain a license that will enable domestic pharmaceutical companies to manufacture and distribute a generic version of the Paxlovid antiviral drug manufactured by the American company COVID in China.
Numerous Chinese have attempted to purchase the drug overseas and have it delivered to China.
CanSino Biologics Inc. of China announced that trial production of its COVID mRNA booster vaccine, CS-2034, had begun on the vaccine front.
China has used nine domestically developed vaccines, including inactivated vaccines, that have been approved for use. However, none of these vaccines have been modified to target the highly transmissible Omicron variant and its offspring that are currently in circulation.
According to government data that were made public last month, while the overall vaccination rate in the nation is greater than 90%, the rate of adults who have received booster shots drops to 57.9% and to 42.3% for people aged 80 and older.
China’s official virus death toll since the pandemic began is now 5,267, one of the lowest in the world, as three new COVID deaths were reported on the mainland on Friday.
Experts in international health believe that Beijing’s narrow definition of COVID deaths does not accurately reflect the true number of deaths, and some anticipate more than a million this year.
More U. S. FDA approves several applications for Alzheimer’s drug
