© Reuters. Medical workers treat coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients in an intensive care unit (ICU) converted from a conference room, at a hospital in Cangzhou, Hebei province, China, January 11, 2023. China Daily via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS
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By Bernard Orr and Liz Lee
BEIJING (Reuters) – The peak of the COVID-19 wave in China is expected to last for two to three months, soon spreading across the vast countryside where medical resources are relatively scarce, a top Chinese epidemiologist has said.
Infections are expected to surge in rural areas as hundreds of millions travel to their home cities for the Lunar New Year holidays, which officially begin on January 21, known before the pandemic as the largest annual migration of people. of the world.
China last month abruptly abandoned the strict anti-virus regime of mass lockdowns that spurred historic protests across the country in late November and finally reopened its borders last Sunday.
The abrupt rollback of restrictions has unleashed the virus on China’s 1.4 billion people, more than a third of whom live in regions where infections have already passed their peak, according to state media.
But the worst of the outbreak was not over yet, warned Zeng Guang, a former chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a report in local news outlet Caixin on Thursday.
“Our priority focus has been on big cities. It is time to focus on rural areas,” Zeng said.
He said large numbers of people in the countryside, where medical facilities are relatively poor, are being left behind, including the elderly, sick and disabled.
The World Health Organization also warned this week about the risks arising from holiday travel.
The UN agency said China was grossly undercounting COVID deaths, though it is now providing more information on its outbreak.
China’s foreign ministry said the country’s health officials have had five technical exchanges with the WHO over the past month and have been transparent.
Health authorities have been reporting five or fewer deaths a day for the past month, numbers that are not consistent with the long lines seen at funeral homes and body bags seen pouring out of overcrowded hospitals.
The country has not reported data on COVID deaths since Monday. Officials said in December that they planned to issue monthly, rather than daily, updates going forward.
Although international health experts have predicted 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 about data transparency were among the factors that led more than a dozen countries to require pre-departure COVID tests for travelers arriving from China.
Beijing, which closed its borders with the rest of the world for three years and still requires all visitors to be tested before their trip, has said it strongly opposes such restrictions, which it considers “discriminatory” and “unscientific”. .
Tensions rose this week with South Korea and Japan, and China retaliated by suspending short-term visas for its citizens. The two countries are also limiting flights, testing travelers from China upon arrival and quarantining those who are positive.
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 one-sided, unrelated to COVID and extremely “regrettable.”
MOVING
Parts of China were returning to normal life.
In the larger cities in particular, residents are increasingly on the move, pointing to a gradual recovery in consumption and economic activity this year. Still, traffic data and other indicators have yet to fully recover to the levels of just a few months ago.
Many economists remain cautious about the pace of recovery after the faster-than-expected reopening.
Consumption, in fact, is a perennial concern, bolstered by 2022 trade data released on Friday, which showed exports rising much faster than imports.
Data next week is expected to show China’s economy grew just 2.8% in 2022 under the weight of repeated lockdowns, the second slowest since 1976, the last year of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, that lasted a decade and destroyed the economy, according to a Reuters poll. .
Growth is then expected to pick up to 4.9% this year, still well below the trend of recent decades.
