The many trips during the Lunar New Year holidays, which falls on Sunday, raise fears of a further worsening of the epidemic in the country.
Source AFP
© FANG DONGXU / MAXPPP / Featurechina/MAXPPP
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LChina reported on Saturday January 21 nearly 13,000 Covid-19-related deaths in hospital between January 13 and 19, with a senior health official saying the vast majority of the population had already been infected. In a press release, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) specifies that during this period, 681 patients died in hospital from respiratory failure caused by Covid and 11,977 from other illnesses combined. to the virus.
This data does not include those who succumbed to the coronavirus at home. In mid-January, more than a month after the lifting of health restrictions, China had reported around 60,000 Covid-related deaths in medical institutions across the country between December 8, 2022 and January 12, 2023, an estimated toll undervalued.
According to the British medical analysis company Airfinity, the daily number of Covid deaths in China is expected to climb to around 36,000 during the Lunar New Year holidays. Airfinity also estimates that more than 600,000 people have died from the disease since China dropped restrictions in December.
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80% of population affected
Tens of millions of people have traveled across the country in recent days to meet up with family for the New Year festivities which fell on Sunday, raising fears of the risk of a new explosion in the number of contaminations. Chinese transport authorities forecast that more than two billion trips would be completed in the month to February.
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But although these movements can promote transmission, “the current epidemic wave has already infected about 80% of the population in the country,” said CDC chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyou in a message posted on the network on Saturday. Weibo chinese social. According to him, “in the short term, for example, in the next two or three months, the possibility […] of a second epidemic wave on the country is very small”.
