A Chinese woman in a Yang-Ming-Baxov refugee complains about the lack of public support for Covid

In China’s far west region of Xinjiang, officials imposed a near-total lockdown and made a rare admission of failure in their handling of a Covid outbreak. In Inner Mongolia, the authorities said they would work to cut the spread of the virus. And in a popular travel destination in Yunnan, in China’s south, the government canceled flights, trapping crowds of angry tourists at an airport.

She is fighting back tears as she curses at the hazmat-suited workers in a video that has gone viral on social media and appears to highlight the frustration the Chinese public has with their government.

The woman has been under observation since she returned from university in the summer and yelled at the workers. They look back at each other.

But even as signs indicate that China’s population has widespread natural immunity, as in other countries, that does not mean the virus is gone or that China’s health care systems are prepared for potential future surges driven by potential new variants, experts say.

That claim comes even as infections flare and a new strain circulates just days before the country’s most important political event, the Communist Party Congress beginning in Beijing on Sunday at which Xi Jinping is expected to cement his place as the country’s most powerful leader in decades.

Observers across the world will be watching to see if there are signs of priorities when it comes to the party’s zero- Covid stance, which has been blamed for worsening the economy and a collapsing housing market.

I Saw It Earlier: A Zero-Covid Party in China’s Social Media Square and its Impact on the Economy and Human-Formation

There is a high level of nervousness in China’s capital where online photos posted Thursday appeared to show a rare public protest. “Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. Yes, to be fair, no to lies. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. Yes to vote, no to a great leader. There were banners hung over an overpass that urged people to be a citizen and don’t be a slave.

The site of the protest was immediately removed from search results by Weibo. Before long, key words including “Beijing,” “Haidian,” “warrior,” “brave man,” and even “courage” were restricted from search.

Many accounts on social media platforms, like Weibo and China’s most popular app, WeChat, have been stopped after they commented on the protest.

Still, many spoke out and expressed their admiration. Some shared a Chinese pop hit in a nod to the protester, while others swore never to forget, posting under the #: “I saw it.”

Even in spite of rising public discontent, all the signs point to the zero-covid approach as being the one the party will stick with for at least two more years.

The lockdown also wracked havoc on the economy. The youth unemployment rate hit a record high of 20% in the three months ending in June as China’s GDP shrunk by 2.6%.

Since China relaxed the zero- Covid policy, we don’t know how many people were affected or how many deaths were attributed to it.

China vows not to let its guard down after the latest BF.7 coronavirus lockdowns in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia

Spooked by the possibility of unpredictable and unannounced snap lockdowns – and mindful that authorities have previously backtracked after suggesting that no such measures were coming – some people in the city have reportedly been hoarding drinking water.

That panic buying has been made worse by an announcement that Shanghai’s water authorities have taken action to ensure water quality after discovering saltwater inflows to two reservoirs at the mouth of the Yangtze River in September.

Exactly what is driving the increase in infections is not clear, though authorities are scrambling to contain the spread of the BF.7 coronavirus strain after it was first detected in China in late September in Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia.

The country has also seen an uptick in cases in domestic tourist destinations, despite its strict curbs having discouraged people from traveling or spending over China’s Golden Week holiday in early October.

More than 240,000 university students in Inner Mongolia have been locked down on campuses due to the latest outbreak, according to Zhang Xiaoying, a deputy director of the regional Department of Education. The Communist Party boss of the university was fired after 39 students tested positive for the disease.

More than 20 million people in western Xinjiang are banned from leaving the region and are required to stay, so there’s a lot going on. Xinjiang recorded 403 new cases on Thursday, according to an official tally.

Yet amid it all, Beijing appears unwilling to move from its hardline stance. The Communist Party’s publication of commentaries reiterates that China will not let its guard down.

It insisted the fight against Covid was winnable. The countries that had opened their borders had no choice, as they had failed to control the epidemic in a timely manner.

Going out in public: A case study of Xi’s unauthorized access to public places during his third term as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party

When he is re-elected to a third term as party chief on Sunday, Xi will cement his place as China’s most powerful leader in decades.

As China’s Communist Party National Congress meets this week to approve the party’s priorities for the next five years, many are watching for signs restrictions could be loosened. But with Xi having personally tied himself to the policy, any change would need to come straight from the top – and from a leader, who throughout his rule, has sought to extend, not curtail, the party’s control on daily life.

Consumers can now shop, eat and travel from anywhere in China with the advanced online ecosystem that runs on mobile phone superapps. Now, those technologies play a role in constraining daily life.

She said that her health code was turned yellow, which meant that she couldn’t go to most public places until she waited for a test that came back a negative result. She decided to stay at home and wait and see, since she knew she could go out freely now that the rules have changed.

A negative Covid test and not being flagged as a close contact of a patient are the data points for basic activities across the country.

Going out in public can be a risk in itself, as being placed under quarantine or barricaded by authorities into a mall or office building as part of a snap lockdown could simply depend on whether someone in the general vicinity ends up testing positive.

“(You see) all the flaws of big data when it has control over your daily life,” said one Shanghai resident surnamed Li, who spent a recent afternoon scrambling to prove he didn’t need to quarantine after a tracking system pinned his wife to a location near to where a positive case had been detected.

Li, who was with his wife, said they were able to reach the hotline and explain the situation after he returned his health code to green.

Vaccination Science: The Cost of a Covid-19 Policy and Its Implications for the Vaccines and ICU Expansion in China

The editorial was part of a series of three released by the party’s publication last week that seemed to lower the expectation about policy changes ahead of the Party.

“What makes you think that you won’t be on that late-night bus one day?” read a viral comment, which garnered more than 250,000 likes before it was censored – one of a number of glimpses into rising frustration with the cost of the policy.

Last week, a rare political protest in Beijing saw banners hung from a bridge along the capital’s busy Third Ring Road that zoned in on social controls under the policy.

At the opening of the congress, Xi said his Covid policy has prioritized the people and their lives above all else. He won a third term in politics, and was able to stack the party’s top ranks with his allies.

The impact of the controls is getting sharper as they have become more frequent in leaving people unable to obtain food and medicine and struggling with lost income.

In the run up to the Party Congress, controls amplified – as local authorities around the country sought to tamp down on outbreaks coinciding with the major political event.

Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong explained that the cost of maintaining the zero- cood strategy has risen due to the increasing incidence of the new strains of the virus.

And backing away from the policy will come with significant consequences. It is believed that by allowing the virus to spread in the country, China would likely increase Covid-19 deaths to unseen levels, as well as put a heavy burden on the economy.

“It is really critical for China to achieve the highest vaccination coverage possible in the period immediately before the major epidemic takes off,” says James Trauer, an infectious-disease modeller at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the projections for the toll and the impact of measures to slow the spread of the epidemic.

Given that 700 million people will catch COVID in China in the next few months, we thought it was a good time to dig into the science of the Chinese vaccines and analyze what the data show.

“The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Chinese Health Codes for Covid-19: Travel Rules, Monitoring, Control, Education, and the World’s Health Care System – A View from the Editor

Already the health code system has been used to diffuse social protest – with petitioners who lost their savings in rural banks barred from protesting after their health codes inexplicably turned red.

The Chinese government announced steps to simplify travel rules and adjust its monitoring and control regime on Friday.

At a news conference last week, the disease control official said that the measures were aboutoptimizing the existing Covid prevention and control policy. “They are not an easing (of control), let alone reopening or ‘lying flat’,” he said.

The highest number of domestically transmitted cases this year was reported by the government onThursday, and authorities were prepared for the situation to get worse.

The National Health Commission warned that the epidemic “is likely to further expand in scope and scale” due to mutations and weather factors in the winter and spring.

Matthew Bossons is an editor and journalist who is based in Shanghai. He has lived in China for a number of years. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Students in many cities in China are back to remote learning. My daughter’s kindergarten was closed because of restrictions related to Covid-19, and she is taking two weeks off school. She has spent more time at home than in the classroom.

Why should an ordinary Chinese citizen be trapped in a locked-down apartment? The case of SHANGHAI, the capital city of China

It has been nearly impossible to plan more than a few minutes in advance because of restrictions at a moment’s notice. This is bad for business, of course, but it also affects ordinary people’s ability to go about their lives — you never know when you might get locked down in your apartment, workplace, a local mall or even Shanghai Disneyland.

Some friends who have had to endure an emergency, like the one where they were trapped at the local pub, have taken to carrying a backpack of their clothes, belongings and work essentials with them so that they could stay safe.

Similar scenes are playing out across Beijing, as offices, shops and residential communities report being understaffed or shifting working arrangements as employees fall ill with the virus. Meanwhile, others stay home to avoid being infected.

There is a city in SHANGHAI. Leaving my apartment was like an aircraft pilot’s routine before take off. Mask: check. Anti-viral hand sanitizer: Check. Green code on my smartphone reflecting latest negative Covid test: Check. Courage to actually go outside and risk getting ensnared in an abrupt lockdown somewhere: Check.

You would presume that traveling from a city with a well-publicized disease outbreak would be enough to warrant immediate notice of self-isolation upon debarking the plane. Alas, not.

But here’s the real kicker: While I needed to stay home for four days, my wife and daughter, who live with me, were allowed to leave the apartment and wander around the city at will. Now, let’s assume I was infected with the virus and that my family were now carriers: Why would a policy intended to protect people’s health “to the greatest extent possible,” to quote Xi, allow for such a flagrant risk to public wellness?

I believe China is in danger of having a mental health crisis caused by the isolation and uncertainty that come with sudden and long lock-ups.

Earlier this month, a 55-year-old woman reportedly suffering from anxiety disorders jumped to her death from her locked-down apartment building in the capital city of China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

Also this month, a 3-year-old boy died following a suspected gas leak at a locked-down residential compound in the western city of Lanzhou. On social media, the boy’s father alleged that he tried to alert local health workers to call an ambulance but was denied prompt access to emergency services due to his Covid-19 testing status.

Even the most stringent measures failed to tame Omicron. By October, China was reporting thousands of daily infections again. Amid mounting public frustration, the People’s Daily, the party’s main mouthpiece, insisted zero-Covid is “sustainable” and the country’s “best choice.”

The internet rage machine ran at full capacity after the young boy died in Lanzhou, with over one hundred million views for the same topic on Webo.

The government had removed posts related to the incident and imposed excessive Covid-19 prevention measures. Unverified videos circulating online show city residents taking to the streets in a rare show of resistance, shouting at what appears to be public health workers and riot police.

Unfortunately for those hoping for a swift end to zero-Covid, negative public feedback is unlikely to result in any immediate changes. It has happened before, and if the economic situation doesn’t improve, the government may have to rethink its position.

China doesn’t always live in the dark: when auto dealers see their father in video chat on November 1: a family in Beijing is locked down by Covid

Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. If you sign up, you will get notifications.

The family home on the outskirts of Beijing was locked down on November 1 after Zhou, an auto dealer in northeastern China, saw his father in a video chat.

They didn’t know the Covid restrictions had been imposed at the time and Zhou’s parents and son lived in an apartment building without any cases.

“The local government killed my dad,” Zhou told CNN in his Beijing home, breaking down in tears. He said he’s received no explanation about why the ambulance took so long to arrive, just a death certificate stating the wrong date of death.

Zhou said he contacted several state media outlets in Beijing to report on his story, but no reporters came. Amid growing desperation and anger, he turned to foreign media – despite knowing the risk of repercussions from the government. CNN is only using his surname to mitigate that risk.

In the central city of Zhengzhou this week, workers at the world’s biggest iPhone assembly factory clashed with hazmat-suited security officers over a delay in bonus payment and chaotic Covid rules.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/25/china/china-zero-covid-discontent-reopening-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

Protest against Covid-19 in Chongqing: a protest leader in Beijing’s city of the 21st century apologized for his actions

On Thursday, in the bustling metropolis of Chongqing, a resident delivered a speech condemning the Covid lock down on his residential compound. Without freedom, I would rather die. He was hailed a hero by a crowd and wrestled from police officers who were trying to take him away.

Chinese football fans have only been able to view the World Cup from their home, and some are under a form of confinement, so the defiance shown by these acts of defiance echoed an uproar online.

There are signs that Chinese officials are feeling the heat of the growing public discontent, which came on top of the heavy social and economic tolls inflicted by the widening lockdowns.

Instead of relaxing controls, many local officials are reverting to the zero-tolerance playbook, attempting to stamp out infections as soon as they flare up.

Shijiazhuang, the northern city, was the first to cancel mass testing. It was also possible for students to return to school after a long period of online classes. But as cases rose over the weekend, authorities reimposed a lockdown on Monday, telling residents to stay home.

People arriving in the city are not allowed to enter malls, restaurants, supermarkets or gym for five days. Authorities also shut down cultural and entertainment venues in half of the city.

In Guangzhou, officials this week extended the lockdown on Haizhu district – where the protest took place – for the fifth time, and locked down its most populous Baiyun district.

Despite relaxed rules, restaurants were mostly closed or empty in the capital. Businesses are having difficulty finding staff who are resistant to the disease. Sanlitun, which is one of Beijing’s busiest shopping districts, was not busy despite the removal of the anti-COVID-19 fence.

The Chinese government has denied that the guidelines were meant to help with a pivot to living with the virus.

Zhou said the zero- Covid policy was beneficial to the majority, but it was too restrictive at a local level.

“I don’t want things like this to happen again in China and anywhere in the world,” he said. I lost my dad. My son’s grandfather passed away. I’m angry now.

The Times of Change in Beijing: Zero-Covid Relaxation Reaction in Intl-Heads Knees Revisited

Some physical signs of the zero- Covid controls have been dismantled by workers in China and health code signs are being removed from the metro station walls.

While the changes were greeted with relief by many and sparked discussion online of freer travel within the country – and perhaps even international travel in the future – there was also a sense of uncertainty about what lay ahead.

The world has changed so fast, that it is unbelievable, said a manager at a tech company in Beijing. I think we are getting back to normal life. If I don’t get back to a normal life, I might lose my mind.

How can it change so quickly? “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Ding asked. I think we are like fools. It is up to them. They said it’s good, so then it’s good … that’s what I feel right now. It is so unreal, but I have no choice. All I can do is follow the arrangement.”

The changes were welcome, but David Wang said they brought a feeling of disbelief and chaos to the city, which had gone through a chaotic, more than two-month-long, citywide lock down earlier this year.

“Of course I was very happy about these new changes – (but) most of my friends are showing typical signs of PTSD, they just can’t believe it’s happening,” he said.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/china/china-zero-covid-relaxation-reaction-intl-hnk/index.html

China’s emergence of zero-Covid and its impact on public perceptions of the disease in the early stages of the pandemic

Top health officials in Beijing on Wednesday said the changes to the rules were based on scientific evidence, including the spread of the comparatively milder Omicron variant, the vaccination rate, and China’s level of experience in responding to the virus.

Then, on December 7, the central government announced a drastic overhaul of approach, rolling back lockdowns, testing and allowing residents to isolate at home – effectively abandoning zero-Covid.

The government and state media had long emphasized the dangers of the virus and its potential long-term effects – and used this to justify the maintenance of restrictive policies.

A flood of articles in the past few weeks highlight the less severe nature of Omicron and portray it in a less serious way, but they fall short of the kind of public messaging campaigns that some other countries carried out before their own policies changed.

Omicron was able to get through the cracks of zero- Covid. By mid- March, China was experiencing its worst outbreak of Covid since the initial wave of the pandemic, with several provinces reporting thousands of new cases a day.

What kind of medicine were you supposed to have, and for how long, until there was a widespread infection? In fact, we should have started doing this a long, long time ago,” said Sam Wang, 26, a lawyer in Beijing, who added that the policy release felt “sudden and arbitrary.”

Bob Li, a graduate student in Beijing, who tested positive for the virus on Friday said he wasn’t afraid of the virus, but his mother, who lives in the countryside, stayed up all night worrying about him. Li said that the person found the virus very scary.

Wang said his mother had been preparing for a nuclear winter, buying high-grade N95 masks and he was now waiting for an initial wave of cases to pass.

The impact of the COVID-19 reopening on local authorities and public health and socio-economic risks: How much will the new guidelines go?

Many are interested in the impact on their cities because there has been some contradiction in how the guidelines were implemented as local authorities adjusted.

The health code that shows a positive Covid-19 test would still be necessary for dining in or entering some entertainment venues, despite the national guidelines.

The announcement follows protests in a number of cities against the strict lockdowns. Those led some cities to loosen some restrictions on testing and movement, but the new guidelines go further.

But the government hasn’t stated the goal of its new policy, which could create confusion, says Huang. “These measures will very likely lead to a messy and hasty transition process where local governments ditch all the zero-COVID measures without investing seriously in preparing for the transition,” says Huang, who would have liked to have seen the reopening happen in phases.

Some aspects of the new rules are open to interpretation by the local governments, including when and where to test people, what types of high-risk areas are defined, and how to manage them.

It will be difficult to limit transmission in densely populated high-rise buildings in China, where many people live. The researcher says that if people are allowed to be at home, it will contribute to the spread of the disease. This could overwhelm hospitals.

Researchers say that the timing of the reopening isn’t ideal. Winter is peak influenza season so hospitals will already be experiencing a rise in the number of patients. And many people will also be travelling across the country for next month’s Lunar New Year and spring festival, further increasing viral spread, says Xi Chen, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies China’s public-health system.

The number of people going to the fever clinics on Sunday was 16 times higher than the week before. In China, where there isn’t a strong primary health care system, visiting the hospital is a common cause of minor illness.

Joy Zhang is a sociologist at the University of Kent and she says that the eased restrictions might not help businesses recover from long-term lock ups or remove the social stigma associated with COVID-19. “I’m afraid that the health and socio-economic risk will be passed on to individuals.”

Cowling says that urgent guidance is needed to curb transmission during a surge, such as mask mandates, work-from- home policies and temporary school closings. It’s not clear how officials will identify the peak of an infection wave, because of the reduction in testing.

Why three doses of vaccines are enough, but what is wrong with the rest? The case for mobile clinics and training staff to deal with people’s safety concerns

“There’s a very good level of protection for three doses of either vaccine,” Cowling says. And remember, health experts in the U.S. also recommend people over age 60 receive at least three doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine as well.

The guidelines propose setting up mobile clinics and training medical staff to deal with people’s safety concerns. But they stop short of issuing vaccine mandates or introducing strong incentives for local governments to increase their vaccination rates, says Huang. It’s not clear if the rise in infections will lead to a spike in deaths. He says the full impact remains to be unfolded.

“I have an advantage in that I don’t go to an office to work. She says she doesn’t see a lot of people because she doesn’t have a job at a company or agency. I think I protect myself well.

Why vaccination ignorance persists in China and what they are doing about it? The case of Tan Hua, a dog bites an Indonesian dog

Chinese health care experts believe there are reasons for low vaccination rates among older adults. COVID vaccination campaigns focused initially on essential workers, and efficacy data did not include was not focused on the elderly. The government mostly just enforces “zero COVID” policies to protect against the virus and don’t move to ramp up vaccinations when there’s a limited number of outbreak.

For many, it has its roots in product quality issues that have for years plagued manufacturing in China — including its production of pharmaceuticals. Tan Hua’s case is not a new one.

A dog bit Tan in the ankle. She saw a doctor and was given a shot of what her mother, Hua Xiuzhen, says they were told was the best rabies vaccine on the market. But it didn’t go as planned.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/09/1140830315/why-vaccine-hesitancy-persists-in-china-and-what-theyre-doing-about-it

What Happened to Hua the Very Night of September 11, 1917? The Case for Vaccines in China’s Epidemic Crisis

“That very night she got a headache and dizziness. Her memory declined sharply. She had convulsions. She couldn’t see because everything was dark. She couldn’t walk straight,” Hua told NPR by phone.

They blame the vaccine, and Hua has been on a crusade for justice ever since. She also now avoids all vaccines — including those for COVID-19, of which China has approved 12.

In China, a string of product quality scandals have arisen from the lack of oversight and corruption during the recent decades of economic growth.

If Liang was shifting his focus to less stringent protocols, another prominent public health expert would make dishonest statements about the disease. He went from touting China’s mass quarantine strategy in May to telling a state media outlet that he hasn’t seen cases of COVID-19 causing obvious long-term organ damage.

The initial concerns about the safety have not stopped. “Physicians in China aren’t sure if the vaccines are safe for the elders,” Bouey says. There is some distrust and confusion about the government’s push for these vaccines. I read quite a lot of misinformation about the vaccine’s side effects on Chinese social media.”

COVID-19 is not a flu thing: A perspective from a Hong Kong man on vaccinating a high-profile disease in the 1930s

A good example of that is Jerry, a 33 year old real estate executive in Shanghai. The subject of his name was sensitive and he did not want it to be used.

COVID-19 is kind of a flu thing these days, according to Jerry. He doesn’t believe in the benefits of the vaccine and he hasn’t gotten it.

I believe the virus is changing so fast. “Not a single vaccine can help,” he says, focusing on vaccines’ capacity to prevent transmission rather than save lives.

Jerry estimates that the vaccination rate among his friends — educated, 30-somethings in China’s most cosmopolitan city — may be as low as 60%. He reports that many couples are scared of the side-effects of getting pregnant.

Around half of people in Hong Kong werevaccinated when the omicron variant hit in the spring. The death rate went up to the highest in the world, as hospitals were quickly swamped. Nearly all of those who died were over 60 and not fully vaccinated.

But Huang, of Seton Hall, says the government may be better off bolstering the incentives for people to get the vaccine, and offering assurances of support in case something goes wrong.

Social media reports on the cancellation of the zero-Covid itinerary card in Beijing after the Decay of the First Day of the 2020 Pandemic

The health tracking function on the itinerary card will be taken off on Monday, as authorities announced the change.

It had been a point of contention for many Chinese people because they were concerned about data collection and its use by local governments to ban entry to people who have been to a city with high-risk zones.

But as the scrapping of parts of the zero-Covid infrastructure come apace, there are questions about how the country’s health system will handle a mass outbreak.

Media outlet China Youth Daily documented hours-long lines at a clinic in central Beijing on Friday, and cited unnamed experts calling for residents not to visit hospitals unless necessary.

Health workers in the capital were also grappling with a surge in emergency calls, including from many Covid-positive residents with mild or no symptoms, with a hospital official on Saturday appealing to residents in such cases not to call the city’s 911-like emergency services line and tie up resources needed by the seriously ill.

The daily volume of emergency calls had surged from its usual 5,000 to more than 30,000 in recent days, Chen Zhi, chief physician of the Beijing Emergency Center said, according to official media.

Covid was “spreading rapidly” driven by highly transmissible Omicron variants in China, a top Covid-19 expert, Zhong Nanshan, said in an interview published by state media Saturday.

“No matter how strong the prevention and control is, it will be difficult to completely cut off the transmission chain,” Zhong, who has been a key public voice since the earliest days of the pandemic in 2020, was quoted saying by Xinhua.

The rapid roll out of testing nationwide and the shift by many people to use the test at home have made it difficult to gauge the extent of the spread.

The shock move to lift its measures in the wake of protests against the policy may have put China underprepared for the expected surge of cases.

Zhong, in the state media interview, said the government’s top priority now should be booster shots, particularly for the elderly and others most at risk, especially with China’s Lunar New Year coming up next month – a peak travel time where urban residents visit elderly relatives and return to rural hometowns.

Measures to be undertaken include increasing ICU wards and beds, enhancing medical staff for intensive care and setting up more clinics for fevers, China’s National Health Commission said in a statement.

In preparation for such a drastic exit, experts warned that the country was poorly prepared and that it had fallen short of bolstering the elderly vaccine rate, increase surge and intensive care capacity, and stock antiviral medications.

“What do we do now in China”: Rejoinder on Beijing’s Covid-19 protests over the last few months after the December 4 holiday shopping run

China’s market watchdog said on Friday that there was a “temporary shortage” of some “hot-selling” drugs and vowed to crackdown on price gouging, while major online retailer JD.com last week said it was taking steps to ensure stable supplies after sales for certain medications surged 18 times that week over the same period in October.

The state media in China featured an interview with a Beijing doctor who said people who test positive for Covid-19 do not need to take medication if they have no or mild symptoms.

“People with asymptomatic inflections do not need medication at all. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition,” Li Tongzeng, chief infectious disease physician at Beijing You An Hospital, said in an interview linked to a hashtag viewed more than 370 million times since Friday.

In Beijing and a number of other cities, protests over the restrictions grew to demands for the Communist Party to quit, a level of public dissent not seen in decades. The party responded with a massive show of force and an unknown number of people were arrested at the protests or in the days following.

Concerns have been raised about a new wave of infections that might overwhelm health care resources in some areas.

The government decided to let people with mild symptoms recuperate at home instead of sending them to field hospitals which have become notorious for overcrowding and poor hygiene.

Reports on the Chinese internet, which is tightly controlled by the government, sought to reassure a nervous public, stating that restrictions would continue to be dropped and travel, indoor dining and other economic activity would soon be returning to pre-pandemic conditions.

After the economy shrunk in the three months ending in June, the government promised to reduce the cost and disruption. The economists think the economy is likely to shrink in the current quarter. Imports tumbled 10.9% from a year ago in November in a sign of weak demand.

Amid the unpredictable messaging from Beijing, experts warn there still is a chance the ruling party might reverse course and reimpose restrictions if a large-scale outbreak ensues.

Local governments could assign their own regulations because of last week’s announcement. Most restaurants in Beijing, for example, still require a negative test result obtained over the previous 48 hours and rules are even stricter for government offices.

Editor’s note: Lars Hamer is the editor-in-chief of that’s. The knock every resident here dreads

Editor’s Note: Lars Hamer is the Editor-in-Chief of the China lifestyle magazine, That’s. He has been in China for a while. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Follow him on Twitter @LarsHamer1. Read more opinions on CNN.

It’s the knock every resident here dreads. Early Tuesday morning, a sudden loud banging at the door of my apartment in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Health care workers in hazmat suits were telling everyone to go downstairs because a neighbor had tested positive for Covid-19.

I had a good reason to be worried. A teacher friend of mine was sent to centralized quark with his colleagues after a child at his school was diagnosed with Covid-19. I was worried the same thing would happen to me.

There was nothing of the sort. I took a Covid-19 test and underwhelmingly, that was it. Before my result even came out, I was free to leave my house and go about my day, totally unrestricted.

I would have been labeled a close contact by the facility and powerless to avoid it if it happened just a few days before.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/opinions/china-covid-restrictions-lifted-guangzhou-hamer/index.html

Beijing: From a ghost town to a bustling metropolis: A case study of the COVID-19 outbreak in Guangzhou

Over the course of a few days, Guangzhou, a city of fifteen million people, has gone from being a ghost town to being a bustling metropolis.

In the event of a lockdown, a new measure prohibits blocking of fire exits. Now, people who are infected can isolate themselves at home. Quarantine facilities are soon to be a thing of the past.

Friends and families who hadn’t seen each other in months were gathering in bars and restaurants, and we had no way of knowing if they were there or not.

I spent most days working until late at night because it was the only thing to do; non-essential businesses had closed, and millions of people were confined to their homes. I too began to feel the strain and started considering leaving the country.

It was a moment of complete disbelief. Similar to the one that occurred in Shanghai in April, Guangzhou had thousands of cases that day.

China has stopped publishing daily COVID-19 data, adding to concerns that the country’s leadership may be concealing negative information about the pandemic following the easing of restrictions.

A notice on the commission’s website said it stopped publishing daily figures on numbers of COVID-19 cases where no symptoms are detected since it was “impossible to accurately grasp the actual number of asymptomatic infected persons,” which have generally accounted for the vast majority of new infections. The only numbers they’re reporting are confirmed cases detected in public testing facilities.

There are now lines at fever clinics and at pharmacies, which is harder to find, in Beijing, where the streets have grown eerily quiet.

At the China-Japan Friendship Hospital’s fever clinic in Beijing, a dozen people waited for nucleic acid test results. The nurses are wearing full-body white protective gear.

A few kilometers from the hospital, there was a line of blue tents with about a dozen people in them. The person in the queue sprayed a bottle of Disinfectant on the other person.

Across the street at Gaoji Baikang Pharmacy, around a dozen people waited in line for cough medication and Chinese herbal remedies. The front of the store has a sign that says, “avoid panic and hoarding, we are doing all we can to fulfill your needs.” A man coming out had bought two packages of Lianhua Qingwen, a Chinese herbal remedy, saying that each customer was restricted from buying any more than that.

China’s epidemic response of COVID-19: State department and city officials meet Beijing on Tuesday for a public assessment of the city’s health problems

China’s government-supplied figures have not been independently verified and questions have been raised about whether the Communist Party has sought to minimize numbers of cases and deaths.

The United States State Department said that there has been an increase in cases of Covid-19 and that emergency services have been offered only in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang and the central city of Wuhan.

Hospitals have also reportedly been struggling to remain staffed, while packages were piling up at distribution points because of a shortage of China’s ubiquitous motorized tricycle delivery drivers.

Some Chinese universities say they will allow students to finish the semester from home in hopes of reducing the potential for a bigger COVID-19 outbreak during the January Lunar New Year travel rush.

The move follows the government’s dramatic announcement last week that it was ending many of the strictest measures, following three years during which it enforced some of the world’s tightest virus restrictions.

The shopping district Sanlitun had a visible impact of the city’s outbreak on Tuesday. The usually bustling shops and restaurants were without customers there, and in some cases they were only open for takeout.

According to a worker at the Beijing neighborhood committee office, 21 of the 24 workers had fallen ill in the last few days.

Sylvia Sun, an employee, said there was not much work being given to them. Parent-child activities, lectures, performances, and other events will not be held.

Reducing levels of official testing make it difficult to estimate the number of infections, according to the NHC.

In a Twitter post, Beijing-based lawyer and former American Chamber of Commerce in China chairman James Zimmerman said about 90% of people in his office had Covid, up from around half a few days ago.

The city’s major hospitals recorded 19,000 patients with flu symptoms from December 5 to 11 – more than six times that of the previous week, a health official said Monday.

So far, however, there were only 50 severe and critical cases in hospitals, most of whom had underlying health conditions, Sun Chunlan, China’s top official in charge of managing Covid, said during an inspection of Beijing’s epidemic response on Tuesday.

“At present, the number of newly infected people in Beijing is increasing rapidly, but most of them are asymptomatic and mild cases,” said Sun, who also called for more fever clinics to be set up and made assurances that supply of medicines – which have been hit by a surge in purchases in recent days – was being increased.

The doctor said hospitals should make sure health workers were not getting infections as quickly as people in the communities they serve. He said that a shortage of medical staff and infections among patients could happen because of this situation.

Social media users questioned why the reporter, who showed her two-bed room and access to fever medicine in a video interview posted by her employer Beijing Radio and Television Station on Sunday, received such treatment while others were struggling.

Awesome! One sarcastic comment read, “A young reporter gets a space in a temporary hospital and takes liquid Ibuprofen for children that is hard- to- find for parents in Beijing.”

The number of deaths in excess of COVID infections: A comparison of Latin American, Scandinavian and European countries based on preliminary data from the International Health Organization (IHME)

A local government in southwest China suggested making tea out of orange peels and monk fruit – both common ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine – to prevent infection. According to Dr. Zhong, there hasn’t been any medication that has been found to be effective in preventing a COVID infections.

Even for the 100 or so countries that publish monthly national data on all deaths, reaching a figure for excess deaths involves constructing models to try to ascertain the baseline of ‘normal’ deaths. Earlier this year, WHO scientists flagged mistakes in their first estimates for Germany and Sweden, and updated their figures. One study3 covering Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden showed that the IHME results, in particular, are mysteriously out of line with those from the WHO and The Economist.

Msemburi and her colleagues set out to find out how many deaths there were in every country. The authors report that there were between 13.2 million and 16.6 million more deaths than expected in 2020 and 2021. The death toll was between 2 and 3 times higher than the official number. Four out of five excess deaths occurred in middle-income countries (Fig. 1), with some of the worst affected in Latin America. In both years combined, the observed mortality in Peru was double the expected level, and it was between 41% and 51% higher than expected in Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador. Low-income countries have a younger population than do higher-income countries, which is one of the reasons they had fewer deaths. The data was compared with it’s published counterpart. present more-detailed methods and more-refined estimates, by adjusting the way in which underlying mortality trends were forecast for several countries6.

Improving the processes used to record births and deaths, known as civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems, is crucial to improving public health. The World Health Organization is preparing a treaty to strengthen global Preparedness and resilience to future Pandemics, but it should also include the creation of better CRVS systems. More support should go to ventures that give nations information on how to improve their systems — at present, a hodgepodge of advisory groups are supported by the WHO and by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Gates Foundation.

China prepares for a second surge in COVID deaths from the first mass lockdown in a decade before the Lunar New Year holiday

Three professors at the University of Hong Kong made projections on the number of deaths that would occur from a nationwide reopening.

The surge of infections would “likely overload many local health systems across the country,” said the research paper, released last week on the Medrxiv preprint server and which has yet to undergo peer review.

Simultaneously lifting restrictions in all provinces would lead to hospitalization demands 1.5 to 2.5 times of surge hospital capacity, according to the study.

They were the first officially reported deaths since the dramatic easing of restrictions on December 7, although Chinese social media posts have pointed to a surge in demand at Beijing’s funeral homes and crematoriums in recent weeks.

Crematoriums and funeral homes in Beijing say they are already overwhelmed, despite the lack of officially reported COVID deaths. The wait for cremations at the biggest crematorium in Beijing was 10 days, according to staff, as hearses and families filled the lot earlier this week.

Other major cities are also facing a surge in infections. In the financial hub of Shanghai, schools have moved most classes online starting from Monday. In the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, authorities have told students that are already taking online classes and pre-schoolers not to prepare for a return to school.

In the megacity of Chongqing in the southwest, authorities announced on Sunday that public sector workers testing positive for Covid can go to work “as normal” – a remarkable turnaround for a city that only weeks ago had been in the throes of a mass lockdown.

China is preparing for a second surge of people from cities back to their rural villages because the health care system there is much better than in the big cities.

Speaking at a conference in Beijing on Saturday, Wu said the current wave would run until mid-January. The second wave is expected to last from late January to mid-February next year, triggered by the mass travel ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, which falls on January 21.

Hundreds of millions of people leave their hometowns each year to join their families in China’s fast growing cities in a weeks long travel rush called the largest annual human migration on Earth.

The China Public-Health System’s About-Face Did not Flatten the Curve Before a Weak Encounter: A View from Beijing

“It is never too late to flatten the curve,” says Xi Chen, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies China’s public-health system.

The two studies agree on mortality estimates and how interventions affect it. herd immunity will only be achieved after a large and difficult to contain, spread of transmission throughout the entire country was reflected in this similarity.

The vast majority of patients who are exposed to the Omnicron variant won’t be infectious for a long time. Studies show that people will be reinsured every two to three years.

The about-face did not go unnoticed on the Chinese internet. Posts juxtaposing several experts’ TV appearances before and after state policy change – including Zhong and Liang – have garnered more than 100,000 views.

Not all public health and medical experts have changed their views. Zhang Wenhong, the director of a Shanghai hospital affiliated with Fudan University, said the zero-COVID policy should be relaxed even before an outbreak in Shanghai shut the city down for weeks. He was initially attacked online but is being praised for speaking truth to power.

A member of the commission that insisted that Shanghai could not be shut down is getting apologies online.

COVID-19 in China: The era of social media and the role of the diaspora in combatting the disease back in the early 2020s

Much of the online discussion has focused on how to deal with the policy change, which includes preventative measures and treatments.

Untested remedies to fight COVID have again flourished in recent days. An internal medicine doctor who is a member of China’s prestigious Academy of Engineering recommended using iced salt water daily to rinse out your mouth. The online commenters were confused. Is salt water rinse still valid two years down the road? Does an iced version make a difference?” one wrote in a blog post.

The atmosphere back in early 2020 when COVID was first spreading was similar to what it is today. It’s kind of flying in the dark.

Non-state media are at risk of being targeted. The zero-COVID policy and the promotion of traditional Chinese medicine were criticized by a well-read website that was removed from popular social media platforms in August. Its accounts on the popular Chinese social media site, Weibo, remain silent today.

A report in the British tabloid, Daily Mail, has been cited by the Communist Party-controlled newspaper, The Global Times, as saying that Moderna manufactured the virus. The Global Times extensively cited the coverage, using it to attack other unsupported theories about the virus’s origin, including the one that suggested it leaked from a government research lab in Wuhan. Other smaller social media accounts made videos of the report, putting “British Media” in the headlines.

The Chinese diaspora has a role to play in helping people back in China with their Covid experience, Chen says, “knowing that in most cases it will not be that serious.”

She says that people in rural areas rely on television and family members to remain up to date on social media. Many are vulnerable to the disease, live in places where healthcare resources are scarce, and aren’t adept at finding information on social media.

As NPR reported, public health authorities don’t base their messages for the public entirely on science – many considerations are also pragmatic and culturally-based.

Chen says that scientists will need to do some soul searching over the next couple of years. Politics and science will play roles in public health and how do we conduct ourselves? What [are] our ethics?”

Researchers from universities and health institutions in Shanghai modeled the curves of daily new Covid-19 cases and accumulated total cases from the beginning of October to November 29, before the country began easing its nucleic testing requirements.

Climate Change Conference for Nature: The Challenge of the Paris Climate Agreement, Given by the Donald Trump’s Inflationary Statement, and Implications for Climate Action

NASA’s Perseverance rover will drop ten Martian rock samples that could be fetched and returned to Earth by another spacecraft. The best chance of preservation of life on Mars is the relic from an ancient river delta, which the test-tube-sized rock core includes. Perseverance will keep duplicate samples on board so that the retrieval mission can collect them directly from the rover in about ten years.

The final agreement has been reached for the protection of 30% of Earths land and sea by the year 2030.

Nevertheless, the feeling among scientists is optimistic. They welcome a historic agreement, which at times felt nigh-on impossible to achieve. The Paris climate agreement set a key goal of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, which it has created for the first time.

China was co-hosting the event in Canada because its presidency at this conference was originally scheduled to take place in Kunming in 2020. The presidency pressed through the agreement despite the protest from theDRC that rich nations owe more to poor countries for saving the environment. The DRC’s statements were judged to not be a ‘formal objection’, causing consternation among some negotiators. It is done according to the law. Morally, what can I say? Lee White is an environment minister of the country of Gabon.

The conference for Nature has a reporter who is reporting on the dispute that highlights the gulf between good intentions and hard work. “Will this undermine the integrity of the framework?” she asks. I’m glad that it’s all well pushing a document through, but the more important thing is how it’s implemented.

The market turmoil created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will affect global energy supplies. How does the energy crisis affect climate action? These are some of the questions researchers must help to answer in 2023, say Andreas Goldthau and Simone Tagliapietra. They lay out five areas in which scientists can make a difference, including assessing routes to decarbonization in the face of the sky-high energy prices, informing heavy industries’ business models, and shedding light on how energy poverty and inflation threaten political stability.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04541-3

The Risk of COVID-19: Detecting Ant Colonies in the San Diego Bay with Reef-Closed Reef Balls

James said conference organizers should start doing surveys after the event. He ran an anonymous online survey after he got an illness. More than 80% responded, and 28% of them had COVID-19. He writes that they had no idea the risks were so high. The organizers could have made changes to better protect attendees if they had been aware of the problem. And they could have been aware of this issue simply by surveying recent attendees, as I did.” Event organizers say that they follow COVID-19 guidelines and that data-protection concerns hamper surveys.

Ant pupae aren’t the useless, immobile sacks scientists thought they were. The adult ants drink and feed on the juvenile milk produced by them. They are stunted and die sooner if they don’t have it. She thinks the discovery will show people ant colonies as interdependent networks rather than being led by adults.

Eileen Maher protects the tidelands with concrete spheres. Her team sank 360 of these reef balls in the San Diego Bay in 2021. The sand and oyster shells in the spheres encourage oysters to settle on them. The reef is an artificial reef that protects the coastline from being eroded during storms and sequesters carbon dioxide. 3 min read.

COVID-19 in China: what do we really know and how to fight it? The case of Huan Wang, a top infectious disease doctor

According to the latest NHC guidelines, only deaths caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting the virus are classified as Covid deaths, according to a top infectious disease doctor.

An investigation conducted by The Associated Press shows that numbers have been fudged by the way health authorities tally COVID-19 statistics and that it is not always easy to distinguish positive cases from negative ones.

The grandson said that there is no hospital in Beijing that has free beds. The topic of carbon dioxide deaths is sensitive in China, so he didn’t want to be named. His grandfather died Sunday, two hours after checking into the hospital, though China reported no deaths from COVID that weekend.

“I really don’t think the village doctors, or even the township or county hospital, can handle the increased number of severe cases,” says Huan Wang, a researcher at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. “I think the rural villagers are just left on their own in a dark COVID winter.”

There, the outbreak has overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums, triggered shortages of basic medicines, and sparked fears of an even darker month ahead as experts warn of a spread to less resourced rural areas during the upcoming Lunar New Year.

Last week the WHO warned that China may be behind the curve in reporting data, and offered to help with collecting information. WHO Health Emergencies Program Executive Director Michael Ryan said, “In China, what’s been reported is relatively low numbers of cases in ICUs, but anecdotally ICUs are filling up. Last week, a British health data firm estimated that China’s real COVID figures were a million infections and 5000 deaths a day. The health official said the city had 500,000 new COVID cases every day. The report was shared by news outlets, but then seemed to have been edited later to remove the figures. There has also reportedly been surge in need for crematoriums. The protests around the country that were critical of leadership caused China to scrap many of its restrictive COVID measures. There were demonstrations caused by the deaths of 10 people in the fire at an apartment house in Urumqi, in western China’s Xinjiang province. Some people said the deaths could have been avoided if the restrictions were less strict. The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation forecast up to 1 million deaths in the next five years if China doesn’t change its policies. There is concern that celebrations during the New Year in China could become superspreader events.

The IHME predicts up to 1 million deaths in the next ten years if China does not maintain its social distancing policies.

“As the experts say, just set off some fireworks, have a good party, and scare away the Viruses” says Sun Caiyun, an ebullient restaurant owner in Beijing who wants to go back to her village in the northern part of the country. “Of course I am planning on returning home, because Beijing bans firecrackers!”

However, the strain China’s on countryside is already evident as medicine shortages hit rural pharmacies. On Chinese social media, rural residents have been asking for donations, posting pictures of ransacked pharmacy shelves devoid of fever and pain medication. Some of the medication has been diverted to cities, which were initially hardest-hit by the surge and where supplies first ran out.

According to Ray Yip, an epidemiologist who founded the Center for Disease Control’s office in China, the number of deaths is almost bordering on ridiculous.

The hospitals visited by NPR this week were bustling and orderly, with elderly patients lying in gurneys in the lobby because beds had run out.

So far, the health care system has held up in large cities – in part because many migrant workers have only rural health insurance that cannot be used in urban hospitals.

“You just have to suck it for a few days,” says Zhang Xiaohu, a delivery worker who contracted COVID in early December. He says he worked through his symptoms, because he does not receive paid sick leave and could not afford to go to a Beijing hospital. “Being a delivery guy means you have to be the kind of person who dares to risk their lives.”

One man waiting in line said his grandfather started running a fever last week and tested positive for COVID, but they spent days looking for a hospital that could take him.

The figures cited were presented during an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission (NHC) on Wednesday, according to both outlets – which cited sources familiar with the matter or involved in the discussions. The NHC summary said the meeting focused on the treatment of patients affected by the new outbreak.

The NHC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday when a copy of the meeting notes was distributed on Chinese social media, although the document has not been verified.

The Financial Times said it was Sun Yang – a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention – who presented the figures to officials during the closed-door briefing, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Beijing has ordered the distribution of Pfizer’s Covid-19 drug, and a worker in Beijing’s Xicheng district

In the first 20 days of December, the NHC reported only 62,592 Covid cases.

The minutes of the Wednesday closed-door NHC meeting made no reference to discussions concerning how many people may have died in China, according to both reports and the document CNN viewed.

Despite the surge in cases, China has suspended most public testing booths, meaning there is no accurate public measure of the scale of infections across the country.

The state media reported Monday that Beijing will distribute Pfizer’s Covid-19 drug Paxlovid to the community health centers in the coming days.

The state-run China News Service reported Monday that after receiving training, community doctors will administer the medicine to Covid-19 patients and give instructions on how to use them.

“We have received the notice from officials, but it is not clear when the drugs will arrive,” it cited a worker at a local community health center in Beijing’s Xicheng district as saying.

Four doctors in Beijing didn’t have time to eat or drink because the emergency room doctor didn’t have enough time. He said they have been seeing a lot of patients.

The emergency room doctor said he had been working despite his symptoms. “The number of patients is high, and with fewer medical staff, the pressure is multiplied,” said the doctor.

Hundreds of health professionals from across China have traveled to Beijing to assist the city’s medical centers.

The citizens of China have welcomed the reopening of the country with joy and relief, as well as the fact that hundreds of millions of people have been isolated for the past three years.

The border is largely closed to foreigners except for a limited number of family visits and business trips.

“Before I Can Easily See the End”: A New Yorker’s Journey Through China with Border Quarantine Requirements

“Finally, everybody can (live) their normal life,” said one Chinese national living in New York, who hasn’t been home for four years. She said the separation was very painful and that several of her family members and the beloved pet dog she grew up with had died.

My family didn’t attend my graduation. They missed so many things,” she said. “And I also missed so many things for my family. My friends got married during the Pandemic. Even some of them had babies. I feel like I missed everything, I missed the most important points in their lives.”

May Ma, 28, has been unable to go home for nearly three years while living in South Korea. She said the scariest thing about the requirements was worrying about her grandparents’ health and not knowing if she would be able to return in time to say goodbye.

She said the scariest thing was knowing where the end was, but not knowing when she could go back. “I definitely feel very happy, I can finally see the end.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-border-quarantine-travel-reax-intl-hnk/index.html

China’s border quarantine travel sales increase three-year since Trip.com’s first Lunar New Year holiday booking peak in December 2001

The people in China are anticipating outbound travel. Most have not left the country for several years and are now flooding booking sites to plan long-awaited vacations.

Online searches for outbound flights and overseas hotels jumped to a three-year peak on Trip.com, a Chinese travel booking website, according to company data. Searches for popular destinations increased tenfold within half an hour of the announcement, with many people searching for outbound group tours during the Lunar New Year holiday season in late January, data shows.

Macao, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, the United States and the United Kingdom were among the website’s top 10 destinations with the fastest growth in search volume since the announcement.

“I feel like right now, it’s totally a mess,” said the Chinese national in New York. Everybody is sick. So, at least I think right now, it’s not the best time to visit my family. Maybe two or three months later.”

Some destinations are on watch. The Malpensa airport in Milan, one of the country’s largest international airports, has been asked by the bosses of the northern Lombardy region to test all arrivals from China from now until the end of January.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-border-quarantine-travel-reax-intl-hnk/index.html

Lunar New Year in China: Xi Jinping in the midst of a meteoric turn-around and facing a global pandemic

“It doesn’t matter if I can get back in time for Spring Festival,” said Ma in South Korea, referring to Lunar New Year. I can’t bear waiting a little longer but there is hope.

2022 was supposed to be a triumphant year for China and its leader Xi Jinping, as he began his second decade in power with a pledge to restore the nation to greatness.

The chaos and disarray is a stark contrast to the start of the year, when Beijing showcased the success of its Covid containment measures by keeping the coronavirus largely at bay from the Winter Olympics.

As he prepared for a third term in power, it was emphasized that the Chinese political system is superior to those in the west in dealing with pandemics.

Having tied himself so close to zero- Covid, Xi became stuck in his own trap. He couldn’t afford to move away from it, the potential surge of infections and deaths posing too great a risk to his authority before he secured his norm-shattering third term at the congress.

Instead of giving vaccinations to the elderly, authorities spent the next months building bigger scurries, rolling out more frequent mass testing and imposing even more stringent curfews to protect more than 300 million people.

In November, a deadly apartment fire in the western city of Urum is believed to have sparked public anger that had been simmering for months. Rescue efforts were hampered despite official denials.

The nationwide demonstrations posed an unprecedented challenge to Xi. Omicron had seemingly spun out of control, with the country logging a daily record of more than 40,000 infections and the economic strain becoming too severe, as local governments ran out of cash.

While the easing of stifling restrictions is a long-awaited relief for many, the abruptness and haphazardness of it has caught an unprepared public off guard and left them to fend for themselves.

Cold and flu medicines which had been restricted from purchase under zero-covid sold out in a matter of moments. Huge lines have formed outside fever clinics and hospital emergency rooms overflow with patients, many elderly. Crematoriums are struggling to keep up with an influx of bodies.

Now, the true scale of the outbreak and deaths could deal a serious blow to the credibility of a government that had justified years of painful restrictions on the grounds that they were necessary to save lives.

Did Chinese Vaccines Against Infectious Diseases Survive in the Early Stages of Epidemics? Comment on a World Wide Study of Sinovac and CoronaVac

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control called on European countries to randomly test travellers from China, so that they can detect any emerging strains of the infectious disease. The United States, Japan and Australia have put in place measures to monitor travellers from China.

Cowling and his team found that the Chinese vaccines gave just as much protection against disease as the vaccine for adults under the age of 60.

For older adults, the Pfizer vaccine proved significantly more effective after only two doses. Specifically, the Pfizer vaccine offered about 87-to-92% protection for this group while CoronaVac offered only 64-to-75% protection. But, Cowling points out, an extra booster – or third dose – of CoronaVac lifts the protection to about 98%, the same protection observed with three doses of Pfizer.

Cowling thinks that there may be a misconception about Sinopharm because of early data on the effectiveness of the vaccines against infections.

After three to four months, after the immune-evading variant, such as omicron and delta, all vaccines are useless against infections, because they’re not able to bind to the immune system.

However, since then, both CoronaVac and Sinopharm have each been tested in more than a dozen international studies including one in Turkey with about 12,000 participants, one in Brazil with more than 3 million participants and one in Chile that surveyed more than 10 million vaccinations. In one study, looking specifically at the safety of CoronaVac, researchers at the University of São Paulo oversaw the immunization of about 12,000 people. They documented “67 serious adverse events … and all were determined to be unrelated to vaccination,” the team reported. Given these results, “the data available to date indicate that Sinovac-CoronaVac is generally well tolerated and consistent with the safety profile of other licensed, alum-adjuvanted inactivated vaccines,” WHO wrote in May 2021.

Omicron Spread in the Early 2020s: How Beijing is Pushing China Hard for Data Transparency During the Covid-19 Pandemic?

The spread could be “dramatically enhanced” by travels expected during the upcoming Spring Festival, a national holiday period surrounding the Lunar New Year, which falls on January 22, the study said.

It is likely that the Chinese mainland Omicron outbreak will happen in several waves, with the re-appearance of new local waves possibly in late 2023, said the study.

The study recommended emergency measures should be directed at delivering over-the-counter medicine to symptomatic patients who are low-risk, vaccinated, and under 60 years. It was recommended to treat high risk populations with anti-viral drugs when they are older than 60 years old.

China has also been criticized by the World Health Organization for its limited data transparency during the outbreak, including its earlier and more narrow definition of a Covid-19 death, which Chinese health officials updated in January.

There is a lot of data that must be shared from around the world, as well as China, in order for the WHO to track this Pandemic as it enters its fourth year, said Maria Van Kerkhove on Wednesday.

The European Union encouraged member states to introduce a negative Covid test for passengers traveling from China to the EU according to the statement.

The WHO’s Tedros said Wednesday it was “understandable” that some countries were taking these steps, “with circulation in China so high and comprehensive data not forthcoming.”

The group and WHO officials were not happy with the lack of forthcoming genomic data. The latest situation adds to longstanding challenges for the UN body, which faced criticism at the start of the pandemic that it did not push China hard enough for data, amid concerns Beijing was obscuring critical information. Beijing has repeatedly defended its transparency.

In order to track variant, countries use a number of known infections and share those with the public. In the first two years of the Pandemic a lot of public health agencies carried out targeted serology to monitor people who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 and look for new cases of illness. Viruses collected from immunocompromised people, who can harbour infections for weeks or months, were also sequenced, because prolonged infections can give rise to heavily mutated viruses1,2.

In the first two years of the flu epidemic, a high percentage of countries in the high income group sequenced at least some of their cases, including the UK, according to a study. The earlier such data are gathered and shared, the faster scientists can run laboratory tests to look at the new variant’s immune evasion, resistance to antiviral drugs and ability to infect cells, says Sintchenko.

Over the past year, the landscape of testing has changed greatly, according to evolutionaryVirologist Verity Hill from the Yale School of Public Health. Broad-scale population-based screening was feasible in countries such as the United Kingdom because researchers could tap into samples collected at community-based PCR testing facilities. But in many countries authorities are no longer offering such services because of the expense and the decrease in demand, says Hill. And people are increasingly opting to self-test, using rapid antigen tests, or not test at all.

The main target of the body’s immune responses are host cells, which is the reason experts look for Mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. A jump in the number of mutations in a new variant is one thing to watch out for, says Hill. She says that it is a warning flag. The Omicron variant had many different changes in its spike protein, which originally appeared in a sequence from Botswana.

The World Health Organization only designates a new variant of concern if it is better at evading immune system protections and causes more severe disease.

Omicron not only contained many mutations, but also rapidly became a dominant variant in the population, suggesting it was spreading faster than, and out-competing, other variants in the community. Within days of South African researchers alerting the international community, the WHO designated Omicron a variant of concern. But that came nearly three weeks after the first Omicron sequence was deposited into GISAID.

The first sample of the Delta variant was collected in India seven months before it was designated a variant of concern. The first sign that there was a new variant was a rise in the number of hospitalizations and deaths in India at the start of 2021. “It’s connecting case counts and genetics as much as you can,” says Hill.

So far, most of the sequences that China has submitted to GISAID since the beginning of December belong to Omicron subvariants already in circulation elsewhere. There are five new families that are not likely to spread outside of China because of pre-existing immunity.

A COVID-19 researcher in China, who has asked to remain anonymous to avoid undue attention for weighing in on political matters, says that although current surveillance in China is insufficient, China is building its capacity and ramping up the number of sequences it uploads to GISAID each week.

In the latest signal the country is seeking to minimize the political ramifications from zero- Covid, a closed-door meeting of the ruling Communist Party’s top decision-making body made the assessment on Thursday.

Chinese public perception of the swine-flue epidemic emerges after a brief surge in December 2009: How has China coped with its crisis?

The years-long policy had generated widespread discontent – including rare nationwide protests – before it was scrapped in December amid rising economic costs, in a decision that caught the public off-guard.

A surge in cases saw hospitals overwhelmed by patients, and people scrambling for basic medicines, as a result of the swift reversal of disease controls. The outbreak seems to have waned in intensity in the last few weeks, with official figures showing visits to clinics are back to where they were before the restrictions were lifted.

The Politburo Standing Committee said that the nation created a miracle in human history as it successfully pulled through the swine flue epidemic according to a summary published by IANS.

But experts say the assessment – the first from China’s top leaders since the surge of cases has appeared to recede – merely serves to underscore the deep questions that remain about the impact of the outbreak on the country.

In late January, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyou said on his personal social media account that around 80% of people in China had already been infected.

Reported death figures have also declined, with China reporting just 912 hospital deaths for the week of February 3-9, according to the latest CDC reporting, which also says fatalities peaked on January 4 with a total of 4,273 deaths that day.

The death toll over the last couple of months has been put at upwards of one million by several international reports. “You can’t expect the government to admit to this (scale),” he said, “because people are going to ask the question – how could we have paid so much economic and social cost (from zero-Covid) to essentially come up with an outcome that is equal if not worse to the (toll in the) US.”

As the surge appears to have waned, Chinese leaders are seizing the moment to take control of the story around the outbreak.

“People’s lives are returning to normal, and the viral wave comes to an end, so that kind of uncertainty (about the outbreak) is no longer there, and there is a need to reconcile the contradictory narrative, the credibility crisis that the abrupt policy U-turn created,” Huang said, referring to the shift in official tone as China swiftly adjusted from warning about the dangers of the virus and the need to contain it, to allowing it to spread.

The Politburo Standing Committee called for better medical services in order to bolster health care in its meeting, and also called for a plan for the next vaccine phase, according to the summary.

“Covid is still around and will be with us for much, much longer,” he said. The health care system still has a challenge after this.