Even though the wave has already peaked in some cities, the corona tsunami continues to keep China in check. Foreign countries are also reacting.
Munich/Beijing – Many Chinese had imagined things differently: Western governments and experts have been calling for months for China to finally abandon the coronavirus measures and open up to the rest of the world – and as soon as China does exactly that, many countries will open up once the barriers come down. Japan, for example, has limited the number of flights from China and Morocco has even issued a general entry ban for people from the People’s Republic. Other countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain and the United States, require travelers from China to have a negative corona test. It could be difficult with overseas travel in the near future, even if the Beijing government wants to reissue passports and lift the quarantine requirement for returning travelers at the end of the week. “Unfair,” writes one user on Chinese social media platform Weibo; another feels “discriminated against”.
All those countries that have issued entry restrictions justify it with the gigantic corona wave that is currently hitting the People’s Republic. China surprisingly decided on Dec. 7 to lift nearly all coronavirus restrictions after three years of a zero-Covid policy with mass testing, lockdowns and curfews. Since then, hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been infected with the virus and thousands have died. China’s health authority recently stopped publishing official infection data, and the death statistics only include corona-infected people who died from pneumonia or respiratory failure. According to internal estimates by the authority, 248 million people in China were infected with the virus in the first three weeks of December alone; meanwhile there are likely to be many more, by the end of the current wave, according to forecasts, almost everyone in China will have been infected.
Expert: There is a risk of one billion people infected
University of Hong Kong epidemiologist Ben Cowling, for example, predicts one billion people will be infected this winter alone. That would be more than 70 percent of the Chinese population. “As highly contagious as Omicron is now, it’s hard to imagine lower infection rates,” Cowling told Tagesschau. In early December, when the opening began, the former deputy director of China’s health authority, Feng Zijian, predicted that as many as 80-90 percent of Chinese people would become infected. “No matter how the measures are adjusted, most of us will get infected at some point,” Feng said at the time, according to state media.
Crown in China: Xi Jinping calls for perseverance
With the end of the coronavirus measures, the national testing obligation, which had been a daily companion for many Chinese for years, was no longer applicable. This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to say exactly what the corona situation is in the country at the moment. In some cities and provinces, however, the wave may have already reached its peak. State media reported on Sunday that surveys by regional health authorities in Sichuan, Hainan and Zhejiang provinces showed that more than half of respondents in several cities said they had already been infected. In some cases, the infection rate is said to be nearly 70%.
Calculations by Shanghai scientists also show that the corona surge in the megacities of Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing reached its peak at the end of the year, and in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou also at the end of November. Researchers from Jiao Tong University and Ruijin Hospital suspect, however, that many rural areas in China are still ahead of the big wave. Especially during the Chinese New Year, when hundreds of millions of people travel to their relatives in the country around January 22, the corona situation is likely to get significantly worse again. So infected young city dwellers could become a danger to the older rural population; furthermore, the health system is underdeveloped in many poorer areas.
While hospitals in many cities across the country are already groaning under the weight of the infected and crematoria can no longer keep up with the cremation of the deceased, the head of state and party leader Xi Jinping is calling for perseverance. “The light of hope is right in front of us,” Xi said in an unusually sincere New Year’s speech on Saturday. In his nearly 15-minute speech, Xi also indirectly addressed the late November protests, which are said to have contributed to the demise of his zero-Covid policy. “It is natural for different people to have different concerns or different viewpoints on the same issue,” Xi said. But now it’s important to stick together. “Let’s make an extra effort, because perseverance and solidarity mean victory”.
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Is a new variant of the virus emerging in China?
Meanwhile, fears are growing abroad that a new variant of the virus could emerge in China given the current wave of coronavirus. In a meeting with representatives of Chinese health authorities on Friday, the World Health Organization (WHO) called for more detailed and faster status reports on the infection process in the People’s Republic. Among other things, the data on the genetic sequencing of the cases that tested positive are important in order to be able to promptly identify possible new variants.
Meanwhile, German health politician Janosch Dahmen is calling for “monitoring of mutation variants”, as Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach had already announced. “A large number of people infected with the corona virus gives the virus many opportunities for change,” Dahmen said Bruise. “New, much more dangerous virus variants are unlikely, but possible.” However, the green politician does not believe in the entry restrictions that other countries have already issued. Given the high number of infections in China, it is “unrealistic” to stop the spread of the virus. The politicians of the other traffic light parties SPD and FDP currently do not want to introduce any restrictions for travelers from China.
The criticisms of the federal government’s hesitation come from the opposition. For example, Bavarian Health Minister Klaus Holetschek calls for the introduction of travel restrictions to be considered. Several omicron subvariants are currently predominant in China. Experts assume that the majority of the population in Germany is already immune to these variants through vaccination or infection.
