Covid peak in China for last 2-3 months, expected to hit rural areas

Beijing:

A top Chinese epidemiologist has said that the peak of the COVID-19 wave in China is expected to last for two to three months, and will soon spread to vast rural areas where medical resources are relatively scarce.

Infections are expected to rise in rural areas as millions of people travel to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year holiday, which officially begins on Jan. 21, billed as the biggest annual migration of people before the pandemic. Was known.

China abruptly abandoned the strict anti-virus regime of the massive lockdown that sparked historic protests across the country in late November last month and finally reopened its borders this Sunday.

According to state media, the sudden end of restrictions has spread the virus to China’s 1.4 billion people, more than a third of whom live in areas where infections are already at their peak.

But the worst of the outbreak was not yet over, warned Zeng Guang, former chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a report published Thursday in local media outlet Caixin.

Zeng is quoted as saying, “Our priority has been focusing on the big cities. It is time to focus on the rural areas.”

He said a large number of people in rural areas, where medical facilities are relatively poor, are being left behind, including the elderly, sick and disabled.

This week the World Health Organization also warned of the risks of holiday travel.

The UN agency said China was heavily under-reporting deaths from COVID, though it is now providing more information on the outbreak.

China’s foreign ministry said the country’s health authorities have held five technical exchanges with the WHO in the past month and have been transparent.

Health officials have been reporting five or fewer deaths a day over the past month, inconsistent with the long queues seen at funeral homes and body bags pouring out of overcrowded hospitals.

The country has not reported COVID fatality data since Monday. Officials said in December they planned to release monthly updates instead of daily updates.

Although international health experts predict at least 1 million COVID-related deaths this year, China has reported just over 5,000 since the pandemic began, one of the lowest death rates in the world.

Concerns over data transparency were one of the factors that prompted more than a dozen countries to demand pre-departure COVID testing from travelers arriving from China.

Beijing, which closed its borders to the rest of the world for three years and still requires all visitors to be tested before they travel, has said it strongly opposes such restrictions. , which he finds “discriminatory” and “unscientific”.

As tensions escalated this week with South Korea and Japan, China retaliated by suspending short-term visas for their citizens. Both countries limit flights, test travelers from China upon arrival and quarantine positive people.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said on Friday that Tokyo would continue to ask China to be transparent about its outbreak, calling Beijing’s retaliation unilateral, unrelated to COVID and extremely “regrettable”.

on the move

Some parts of China were returning to normal life.

Residents are moving fast, especially in big cities, pointing to a gradual recovery in consumption and economic activity this year. Nevertheless, traffic data and other indicators have not yet fully recovered to the level of a few months ago.

Many economists remain cautious about the pace of revival following a faster-than-expected reopening.

Consumption is, in fact, a perennial concern, reinforced by 2022 trade data released on Friday, which showed exports grew much faster than imports.

Data next week showed China’s economy growing just 2.8% in 2022, the second-slowest since 1976 under the weight of repeated lockdowns, according to a Reuters poll. It is the last year of the Cultural Revolution, which ruined the economy. ,

Thereafter, this year could see a growth rate of 4.9%, which is still well below the trend of recent decades.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)