China is preparing to face another wave of Covid as people prepare to travel home to spend time with loved ones during the Lunar Year.
It is believed that covid cases could explode as this is the first holiday of the Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival in China, after Beijing lifted all zero covid restrictions.
Nearly 2.1 billion passenger trips are expected to take place during the 40-day travel period around the holidays, considered the world’s largest annual human migration. This is double what happened just a year ago when Beijing imposed travel restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Airports and train stations in megacities like Beijing and Shanghai witnessed huge crowds of people returning home for Lunar New Year celebrations, prompting fears of an outbreak, ABC News reported.
However, health officials in China believe that the country will not experience a second wave of covid infections in the next two to three months.
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“Although a large number of people who travel during the Spring Festival can promote the spread of the epidemic to a certain extent… the current wave of the epidemic has already infected about 80 percent of people in the country,” Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in a post on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform on Saturday.
He said that the possibility of … a second wave of the epidemic across the country in the next two to three months “is very small.”
Meanwhile, China reported nearly 13,000 Covid-related deaths between January 13 and 19, a senior health official said, according to the AFP news agency.
A week ago, nearly 60,000 people died of covid as of January 12, but there has been widespread skepticism about official data since Beijing abruptly removed anti-virus controls last month.
In a statement Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said 681 hospitalized patients had died of respiratory failure caused by coronavirus infection and 11,977 had died of other illnesses combined with infection during period.
(With agency contributions)
