“Winnable” fight against coronaviruses in China, as seen through Weibo: a woman in a hazmat

Wang said that the larger conversation in China was not evenly divided. Those in the metropolis were hoping for a relaxation of the rules, while smaller cities were more willing to believe the government in its long-term story about the dangers of coronaviruses.

Fighting back tears, she shouts abuse at the hazmat-suited workers below in a video that has recently gone viral on social media platform Weibo and which appears to encapsulate the Chinese public’s growing frustration with their government’s uncompromising zero-Covid policy.

The woman shouted at the workers as she was being kept under an scurvy spell since she returned from university. They seem to be unmoved by the stare back.

While most Asian economies – even those with previously hardline zero-Covid stances – are abandoning pandemic-era restrictions, authorities in China remain zealous in theirs, repeatedly insisting this week in state-run media articles that the battle against the virus remains “winnable.”

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.

There will be observers from across the world looking at the twice a decade meeting for clues as to what the party priorities are in relation to the economy.

Do you wish to take the Covid test? An unusual public protest on Weibo: Searching for the Song of the Sitong Bridge

There are lots of people in Beijing, where online photos posted Thursday looked to show an unusual public protest. Do you wish to take the Covid test? Yes to freedom, no to lock it up. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. Yes, to vote for a great leader. One banner hung over the overpass said Don’t be a slave, be a citizen.

Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, immediately censored search results for “Sitong Bridge,” the site of the protest. Before long, the words Beijing,Haidian, warrior,brave man, and even “courage” were restricted from search.

The super-app essential for daily life in China has been banned after comments that alluding to the protest.

Many people spoke out to express their admiration and support. Some shared the Chinese pop hit “Lonely Warrior” in a veiled reference to the protester, who some called a “hero,” while others swore never to forget, posting under the hashtag: “I saw it.”

The state media wrote this week that the country may change tack after Congress, but even so, all the signs suggest that the party will stick with the zero-Covid approach into at least 3 more years.

The lockdown also wracked havoc on the economy. In the second quarter, China’s GDP shrank by 2.5%, while youth unemployment hit a record high of 20%.

China’s Health Commission on Thursday reported 1,476 locally transmitted Covid-19 cases nationwide, a significant number in a country where even one infection can trigger a city-wide lockdown.

The Chinese Communist Party and the Yangtze River Instability: The latest student lockdowns and a desperate fight against Covid

Some people in the city have been drinking more than they need to because of the possible of unpredictable and sudden snap lockdowns.

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.

The reason for the increase in infections is not known, though authorities are racing to contain the spread of the coronaviruses after they were first detected in China.

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 two hundred thousand university students are locked down on campuses due to the latest outbreak according to a deputy director in the Department of Education. And the outbreak on campus has led to punitive action, with one university Communist Party boss being sacked after 39 students from his institution tested positive.

Then there is the situation in far western Xinjiang, where some 22 million people have been banned from leaving the region and are required to stay home. Xinjiang recorded 403 new cases on Thursday, according to an official tally.

Beijing seems unwilling to budge from its hardline stance. For three days this week, the state-run Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily published commentaries reiterating that China would not let its guard down.

The battle against Covid was winnable, it insisted. Other countries that had reopened and eased restrictions had done so because they had no choice, it said, as they had failed to “effectively control the epidemic in a timely manner.”

Chinese Health Code as a Health Code: A Failure on the Side of Big Data? Comments on the Xi-led CMNP Chief Executive

Nearly three years later, however, Xi is poised to cement his place as China’s most powerful leader in decades, when he is anointed with a likely norm-breaking third term as the party chief on Sunday.

Many are watching for signs that the restrictions on travel could be loosened, as the Communist Party National congress meets this week to approve priorities for the next five years. 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.

China has made it possible for consumers to shop, dine and travel in an efficient way thanks to its online platform that is run on mobile phone superapps. Those technologies are used to regulate daily life.

The system, which is separate from the health code scanning system still required in a reduced number of places in China, had used people’s cell phone data to track their travel history in the past 14 days in an attempt to identify those who have been to a city with zone designated “high-risk” by authorities.

Across the country, basic activities like going to the grocery store, riding public transport, or entering an office building depend on holding an up-to-date, negative Covid test and not being flagged as a close contact of a patient – data points reflected by a color code.

It’s a risk to go out in the public as being placed under a precautionaryQuarantine at a mall or an office building can be dangerous, if someone ends up testing positive.

When big data has control over your daily life, there are some flaws in it, said oneShanghai resident as he spent a recent afternoon trying to prove he didn’t need to quark his wife after a tracking system pinned his wife to a location nearby where a positive case was found.

When Li was with his wife, they had not received a message but were able to reach a hotline to discuss their situation, which eventually led to her health code being green.

Putting People First and Prioritizing Life with Dynamic Zero-Covid: A Socially Responsible Perspective of the Third Ring Road in Beijing

“The essence of persisting with dynamic zero-Covid is putting people first and prioritizing life,” read a recent editorial in the People’s Daily – one of three along similar lines released by the party mouthpiece last week in an apparent bid to lower public expectation about any policy changes ahead of the Party Congress.

“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.

The Third Ring Road in Beijing was the scene of a rare political protest last week where banners were hung from a bridge in reference to the social controls under the policy.

For almost three years, China’s low Covid caseload and death count had been seen as a measure of the party’s merit and legitimacy.

As the impact of the controls becomes sharper, so have the times when they’ve left people struggling for access to food and medicine and grappling with lost income.

In the lead up to the party congress, local authorities in the country worked to put out any outbreaks that may coincide with the event.

Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong said that the zero- Covid strategy is more costly now than it was a year ago, because the newest strains of viruses are more transmissible.

Fears about the impact of Covid-19 within China may also play out along generational and geographic lines, as younger people and those in more cosmopolitan urban centers may be more likely to support reopening the country and relaxing rules, residents said.

“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. He also notes that there is still a lot of uncertainty around the projections about the epidemic’s toll and the impact of measures to slow the spread.

According to a calculation by CNN, only 42% of Chinese over the age of 80 have received a third dose of vaccine.

“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.

CNN’s ” Meanwhile in China Newsletter” follows the loss of a Chinese citizen after a video chat on November 1. The family home is locked down

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.

CNN’s ” Meanwhile in China newsletter” is an update on what you need toknow about the country’s rise and impact on the world. You can sign up here.

The family home on the far outskirts of Beijing was locked down just hours after Zhou last saw his father alive in a video chat on the afternoon of November 1.

Zhou’s parents and his son lived in an apartment building with no Covid cases at the time, but they didn’t know about the restrictions at the time.

The family found out the hard way, when Zhou’s father was denied immediate emergency medical help after he suddenly began struggling to breathe during the video call. Zhou and his son made a number of calls for an ambulance and were prevented by security guards from entering the building to take his grandfather to the hospital.

On the same day Zhou lost his father, a 3-year-old boy died of gas poisoning in a locked-down compound in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, because he was blocked from getting to a hospital. Two weeks later, a 4-month-old girl died in hotel quarantine in the central city of Zhengzhou after a 12-hour delay in medical care.

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 using his name to mitigate the risk.

Covid lockdowns in the city of Zhengzhou: a public outrage against zero-COVID and its censorship

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.

On Thursday, a resident in the metropolis of Chongqing delivered a speech in which he criticized the Covid lock-up. “Without freedom, I would rather die!” he shouted to a cheering crowd, who hailed him a “hero” and wrestled him from the grip of several police officers who had attempted to take him away.

Many Chinese football fans who have been unable to watch the World Cup in their home country are angered by these acts of defiance.

“None of the fans are seen wearing face masks, or told to submit proof of Covid test results. Do they not live the same way as we do? asked a Wechat article questioning China’s insistence on zero-Covid, which went viral before it was censored.

There are indications that Chinese officials are starting to feel the effects of public discontent which has come on top of heavy social and economic tolls.

Local officials are reverting back to the “zero tolerance” method of dealing with infections because they’re tired of relaxing controls.

The northern city of Shijiazhuang was among the first to cancel mass testing. It also allowed students to return to schools 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.

On Tuesday, financial hub Shanghai banned anyone arriving in the city from entering venues including shopping malls, restaurants, supermarkets and gyms for five days. Authorities also shut down cultural and entertainment venues in half of the city.

In Guangzhou, the district where the protest took place was locked down for the fifth time.

The streets in Beijing’s largest district are mostly empty as authorities urged residents to stay home. Several districts shifted to online classes this week.

The government has not stated the goal of its policy, which could cause confusion. “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.

Chinese officials denied that the government guidelines listed 20 measures in order to transition to living with the virus.

The measures are tooptimize the Covid prevention and control policy. He said that they are not an easing of control.

While the zero-covid policy is beneficial to most, Zhou said it was too strict 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 a father. My son lost his beloved grandfather. I’m furious now.”

Confused by the world, frustrated by the citywide zero-Covid lockdown, and the sense of uncertainty about what is next in China

Workers across China have dismantled some of the physical signs of the country’s zero-Covid controls, peeling health code scanning signs off metro station walls and closing some checkpoints after the government unveiled an overhaul of its pandemic policy.

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 manager at a tech company in Beijing said that the world has changed overnight. “I feel like 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? Ding asked. It makes me feel like we’re fools. It is up to them. They said it’s good, so then it’s good … that’s what I feel right now. I have nothing else to do but look at it. All that I can do is follow the arrangement.

David Wang, 33, a freelancer in Shanghai, said although the changes were welcome, they had also sparked a feeling of disbelief in the city, which underwent a chaotic, more than two-month-long, citywide lockdown 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

The First Months of Covid: How the Central Government Managed the Changes to the State Health Laws and Responded to China’s Experience

The Chinese health officials said the changes to the rules were based on the spread of theOmicron variant, the vaccination rate, and China’s level of experience in responding to the virus.

Then on December 7, the central government announced a radical shift in approach that rolled back lockdowns and allowed residents to stay at home.

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.

While Omicron may cause relatively milder disease compared to earlier variants, even a small number of serious cases could have a significant impact on the health system in a country of 1.4 billion.

It did not take long for Omicron to get through zero- Covid. By mid-March, China was battling its worst Covid outbreak since the initial wave of the pandemic, reporting thousands of new cases a day, from northern Jilin province to Guangdong in the south.

“People were not told what kind of medicine they should have and what they should do if infected until there was widespread infection. The policy release felt sudden and arbitrary, but SamWang, 26, a lawyer in Beijing, said it should have been done a long time ago.

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. “She finds the virus a very, very scary thing,” Li said.

Meanwhile, his mother was now buying high-grade N95 masks and preparing for a “nuclear winter” until a potential initial wave of cases passed, Wang said.

What can local authorities say about the implementation of the COVID-19 testing rules in China and how to respond to the outbreak, and what to do about it?

Many cities are watching to see the impact on their cities as local authorities adjust how they implement the guidelines.

In Beijing, the health code showing a negative Covid-19 test would still be required for entering some entertainment venues, in contradiction to the national guidelines.

The restrictions that had been in place for a long time were dismantled just a few days ago. On November 30, the Covid-19 testing sites that for so long had dictated our movements were all closed. Soon after, it was announced that lockdowns would only be allowed in “high-risk areas,” allowing businesses outside those areas to resume. Furthermore, a Covid-19 test would no longer be required to enter them.

But researchers say some aspects of the new rules are ambiguous and open to interpretation by local governments, including when and where to test people during an outbreak, what defines high-risk areas and how to manage them.

Furthermore, the guidelines do not lift testing and quarantine requirements for international travellers, which “doesn’t have a rationale if the objective is no longer zero COVID”, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.

China has a lot of densely populated high-rise buildings where it will be hard to limit transmission. Allowing people to quarantine at home will contribute to viral spread, says George Liu, a public-health researcher at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. This could overwhelm hospitals.

It is estimated that China’s reopening could lead to over a million deaths, close to the Covid death toll in the US.

The number of patients visiting fever clinics was 16 times greater on Sunday than a week prior. The hospital is common for minor illnesses in China, because of its weak primary care system.

The sociologist at the University of Kent said that the tighter restrictions might not help businesses recover from long lockdowns or get rid of the social stigma associated with COVID-19. I am worried that the health and socio-economic risk will be passed on to individuals.

Urgent guidance is needed on how to curb transmission during a surge, such as through mask mandates, work-from-home policies and temporary school closures, says Cowling. He said that it wasn’t clear how the officials would track the peak of the infection wave, given the reduction in testing.

The study suggests that if 85% of the population gets a fourth dose of a vaccine other than the in-activatedviruses vaccines most people in the country have received, it could prevent infections and deaths. Pushing fourth vaccine doses, combined with giving antiviral drugs to people aged 60 and older and to other individuals at high-risk of developing severe disease, could reduce deaths by up to 35%.

Two studies show that a fourth vaccine dose could be given to most people in order to reduce the number of deaths. These measures could also ease the burden on hospitals.

The Chinese Covid epidemic has a lot to affront: State-of-the-art surveillance, public debate and the coming Lunar New Year

Changes continued Monday as authorities announced a deactivation of the “mobile itinerary card” health tracking function planned for the following day.

It had been a point of contention for many Chinese people, including due to concerns around data collection and its use by local governments to ban entry to those who have visited a city with a “high-risk zone,” even if they did not go to those areas within that city.

Amid the chaos, the government has stopped reporting the bulk of the country’s Covid infections and narrowed its criteria of counting Covid deaths in a way that the World Health Organization warned would “very much underestimate the true death toll.”

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.

A hospital official on Saturday appealed to Covid-positive residents not to call the emergency services line when they don’t have symptoms, after health workers in the capital were grappling with a surge in emergency calls.

In recent days, the Beijing Emergency Center had seen a huge increase in the number of emergency calls, with the daily volume jumping from 5,000 to more than 30,000.

The University of Hong Kong chair professor of epidemiology said that the current strains will spread faster in China than they have spread in other parts of the world because they have immunity against previous Omicron strains.

Even if prevention and control is strong, it will be difficult to completely cut off the transmission network, as was said by a key public voice during the early days of the H1N1 epidemic.

The rapid roll back of testing nationwide has made it difficult to gauge the extent of the spread, with official data now appearing meaningless as people use antigen tests at home.

Outside experts have warned that China may be underprepared to handle the expected surge of cases, after the surprise move to lift its measures in the wake of nationwide protests against the policy, growing case numbers and rising economic costs.

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.

A lack of experience and many years of state media coverage about the virus makes it easy for people to not know if they need to seek medical care.

Comment on a CNN article by Lars Hamilton: Infectious Diseases, Covid-19, and Prescription Drug Consumption in China

There was a temporary shortage of some hot-selling drugs in China and the market watchdog vowed to crack down on price fixing, while the major online retailer said last week that it was taking steps to ensure stable supplies after sales for certain medications surged 18 times.

A hashtag trending on China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo over the weekend featured a state media interview with a Beijing doctor saying people who tested positive for Covid-19 but had no or mild symptoms did not need to take medication to recover.

People withsymptomatic inflections don’t need medication. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition The chief infectious disease physician at the Beijing You An Hospital said in an interview that has been viewed more than 350 million times since Friday.

There is an Editor-in-Chief of the China lifestyle magazine. He has lived in Guangzhou, China since 2018. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Follow him on Twitter @LarsHamer1. Read more about CNN.

The knock every resident here dreads: A loud noise in the Guangzhou city, a city lockdown triggered by Covid-19

It’s the knock every resident here dreads. Early Tuesday morning, a loud noise was heard at my apartment in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. The health care workers were wearing protective gear and ordered everyone to go upstairs because a neighbor had tested positive for Covid-19.

I had good reason to worry. A friend of mine and his colleagues were sent to centralized quarantining a month ago after a student at his school tested positive for Covid-19. I didn’t think the same thing was going to happen to me.

To my surprise, nothing of the sort. I took a Covid-19 test, and I didn’t do very well. My day was completely unrestricted before my result came out, I was no longer restricted from leaving my house.

If this had occurred just weeks before, I would have, like my friend, been labeled a “close contact” and therefore would have been powerless to avoid the quarantine facility’s vice-like grip.

Over the next few days, the Guangzhou I came to in 2018 was almost back to normal. The streets were lined with people. Friends and families who had not seen each other for months gathered in bars and restaurants, and QR codes were being ripped down from walls; our movements no longer tracked.

Just look at the new measure forbidding the blocking of fire exits in the event of a lockdown, for example. People can be isolated from one another at home. Quarantine facilities are soon to be a thing of the past.

A group of people who hadn’t seen each other in a while were having bars and restaurants torn down to make room for new people.

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 pure disbelief. Guangzhou had almost 8,000 cases that day, numbers similar to those that triggered a city-wide lockdown in Shanghai in April.

China’s National Health Commission said in a statement that it will no longer publish the data daily starting Sunday, and the Chinese CDC will release information for reference and research. The NHC did not say why the change had been made and did not indicate how often the CDC would release data.

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 were widespread shortages of fever and cold medicines after the sudden lifting of restrictions. Long lines have become routine outside fever clinics and hospital wards overflowing with patients in the capital Beijing and elsewhere in the country.

Despite a push to boost vaccinations among the elderly, two centers set up in Beijing to administer shots were empty Tuesday except for medical personnel. There was no indication of a surge in patient numbers despite fears of a major outbreak.

At the China-Japan Friendship Hospital’s fever clinic in Beijing, a dozen people waited for nucleic acid test results. Nurses in full-body white protective gear checked in patients one by one.

A few kilometers (miles) south, at Chaoyang Hospital, about a dozen people waited in a line of blue tents, deflecting winds amid subzero temperatures. One person in the queue took out a bottle of disinfectant and sprayed it around her as she waited.

Across the street at Gaoji Baikang Pharmacy, around a dozen people waited in line for cough medication and Chinese herbal remedies. A sign at the front told customers to not panic and to stock up on their medicine. 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.

Asymptomatic Influence on Beijing’s Health Services and Hospitals after the Covid-Ending Decays: a City Reports

China’s government-supplied figures are not independently verified and questions have arisen about whether the Communist Party is trying to reduce the number of deaths.

The State Department said the U.S. consulates in Beijing and the northeastern city of Shenzhen have stopped offering emergency services due to the increase of COVID-19 cases.

Hospitals have been struggling to retain staff, while packages had been piling up at distribution points because of a shortage of 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.

Following three years of imposing some of the world’s strictest virus restrictions, the government recently announced that it was ending many of the strictest measures.

In Shanghai, protesters even demanded that Xi step down – an unimaginable act of political defiance toward the country’s most powerful and authoritarian leader in decades.

The impact of the outbreak in the city was visible in the upmarket shopping district Sanlitun on Tuesday. There, the usually bustling shops and restaurants were without customers and, in some cases, functioning on skeleton crews or offering takeout only.

Offices, shops, and residential communities in Beijing are reporting being understaffed as employees who have recently been exposed to the virus fall ill. Meanwhile, others stay home to avoid being infected.

A community worker said 21 of her Beijing coworkers fell ill in the past few days.

Sylvia Sun said there was not much work being done by her while her superiors were infectious. “(The usual) events, lectures, performances, parent-child activities will definitely not be held.”

“It is impossible to accurately grasp the actual number of asymptomatic infections,” the NHC said in a notice, citing reduced levels of official testing.

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.

Sunchunlan is the top official in charge of management of Covid and he said that there were only 50 severe and critical cases in hospitals so far.

There are a lot of newly diagnosed people in Beijing, but most of them are mild cases and thus not a threat to public health.

Prominent Shanghai physician Zhang Wenhong warned that hospitals should do everything they could to ensure that health workers were not getting infected as quickly as the people in the communities they serve. Such a situation could lead to a lack of medical professionals and infections among patients, he said.

Social media users questioned why the reporter in a video interview posted by Beijing Radio and Television Station was given treatment when others were struggling.

Awesome! One sarcastic comment read, “A young reporter got a space in a temporary hospital and took Ibuprofen for children that is hard-to- find for parents in Beijing.” which received thousands of likes.

China’s First-Year Reopening Reopens: A Surge of Infections is Already Among the Worst

There is a suggestion made by the local government in southwest China to make tea out of orange rinds and monk fruit for prevention of infections. He has been unable to come up with any medication that is effective at preventing a COVID infection.

Under the current conditions, a nationwide reopening could result in up to 684 deaths per million people, according to the projections by three professors at the University of Hong Kong.

A research paper was released last week and said that a surge of infections would likely overload many local health systems.

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 easing of restrictions on December 7, although there was a surge in demand for funeral homes and crematoriums in recent weeks.

Beijing crematoriums and funeral homes are already over capacity despite the lack of officially reported deaths. At Dongjiao crematorium, one of Beijing’s biggest, a line of hearses and grieving families filled the intake lot earlier this week, and staff told NPR the waiting time for cremations was 10 days.

A surge in infections is being faced by other major cities. 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 a remarkable change, public sector workers who test positive can return to work as usual in the megacity of Chongqing, which only just weeks ago was in the throes of a mass lockdown.

Chinese experts have warned that the worst is yet to come. The Chinese CDC is expecting three waves of infections this winter, and the first wave is hitting the country.

A current wave will run until mid-January, the speaker stated at a Beijing conference. 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.

The largest annual migration on Earth is caused every year by hundreds of millions of people leaving their hometowns to build a life in China’s fast growing cities.

The About-Face of Public Health: How COVID-19 leaves China, how it spreads and how China will respond to state policy changes

“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.

But these estimates include only deaths due directly to COVID-19, and do not take into account excess deaths because of delays in treating people with non-COVID-19 diseases, says Ewan Cameron, a modeller at the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth, Australia.

The two studies all agree on mortality estimates. “This similarity in large part reflects an agreement that herd immunity will only be achieved after a large, and difficult to contain, spread of transmission throughout the entire country.”

While Dr. Zhongngan was fighting the outbreak of the disease, he made false claims about the virus. 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.

80% of patients with the Omnicron variant won’t be reinsured for a long time, according to Zhong. Over time, research shows that people will be re-infecting every two to three years.

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

Wu Fan, a member of Shanghai’s disease outbreak containment expert commission famous for insisting that Shanghai could not shut down is now receiving apologies online.

How China’s Diaspora Helps to Educate the Public About COVID-19, as Revised by Professor Chen Wenhong

The aftermath of policy change has been the focus of much of the online discussion.

Untested remedies to fight COVID have again flourished in recent days. The doctor from the Academy of Engineering in China told him to rinse his mouth with iced salt water. Commenters on the internet were confused. “Wasn’t salt water rinse debunked two years ago? Does an iced version make a difference? one wrote in a blog post.

The chaos and uncertainty right now reminds Chen Wenhong, an associate professor of media studies and sociology at University of Texas, of the atmosphere in early 2020 when COVID was first spreading. It’s kind of flying in the dark.

The most trusted sources for information about COVID-19 for many people in China are state media and health professionals. And with access to the global internet cut off for most, there are few alternatives to state media and its constellation of aligned social media accounts, says Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

A recent example was how the Communist Party-controlled newspaper, The Global Times, cited a misleading report in the British tabloid, Daily Mail, that suggested without evidence that vaccine maker 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 played a very useful role here to share with people back in China about their personal COVID experience,” Chen says, “knowing that in most cases it will not be that serious.”

Many elderly people rely on television and their family members to stay informed when they’re in a larger city because researchers and journalists don’t pay much attention to 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.

The Chinese government need to act quickly to educate vulnerable people about the disease because it is rapidly spreading from large cities to towns and villages.

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 have some soul searching to do in the next couple of years. “If politics and science go hand in glove, how do we conduct ourselves?” What [are] our ethics?”

The curve of daily new Covid-19 cases and cumulative total cases were modeled by researchers from universities and health institutions in China before the country began easing its testing requirements.

COP15 Conference for Nature: Challenges in Understanding Climate Change, Decarbonization, and Inflation: Key Questions for Future Scientists

Ten Martian rock samples will be dropped off by NASA’s Perseverance rover and could be retrieved and returned to Earth. The test-tube-sized rock cores include sediments from an ancient river delta, which have the best chance of preserving evidence of past life on Mars. The cache is a back-up to collect duplicate samples from the rover in about ten years.

The 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity, or COP15, came to a dramatic end early this morning, with a final agreement that will see 30% of Earth’s land and sea protected by 2030.

Scientists are optimistic. They welcome a historic agreement, which at times felt nigh-on impossible to achieve. For the first time, biodiversity targets have been created on par with the Paris climate agreement, which set a goal to limit global warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.

The president of this conference, China, was a strong co- host at the event in Canada due to the fact that it was originally scheduled to take place in Kunming in 2020. The presidency pushed through the agreement despite protests from theDRC concerning the responsibility of rich nations to fund poorer countries. TheDRC’s statements were not seen as a “formal objection” by the negotiators. “Legally, it’s done. What can I say? Lee White is the environment minister of Gabon.

A report at the conference for Nature states the dispute shows a gulf between good intentions and hard work. “Will this undermine the integrity of the framework?” she asks. It’s good to push a document through but it’s more important how it is implemented.

How will the conflict between Russia and Ukrainian affect the supply of energy around the world? And how will the energy crisis affect climate action? These are some of the questions that researchers need toanswer in the future according to 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

How many ants were killed during a sloping landing? An environmental scientist’s perspective on the risks of surveying attendees after a post-conference infection

James Kirchner is an environmental scientist and believes that conference organizers should begin doing surveys after the event. After he got a post-conference infection, he ran his own anonymous online survey of attendees. More than 80% responded, and 28% of them had COVID-19. “We had no idea that the risks were so high,” he writes. “The organizers could have made changes to better protect attendees, if they had known they had a problem in the first place. 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 juvenile produce a feeding fluid for the adult ants to drink and eat. According to social-evolution researcher Orli Snir, without it, they don’t grow or live as long. She believes that the discovery will help people see ant colonies as interdependent networks rather than being led by adults.

Conservationist Eileen Maher protects tidelands with giant, holey concrete spheres. Her team sank 360 of these reef balls in the San Diego Bay in 2021. The spheres contain sand and oyster shells that encourage oysters to settle on them. It creates an artificial reef that protects the shoreline from being eroded during storms and combats climate change by sequestering carbon dioxide. Nature is read for 3 minutes.

China’s dark COVID-19 crisis: A tale of two worlds in a dark winter and three warnings for rural people in the coming Lunar New Year

Cases have skyrocketed since China abandoned zero-Covid , with empty streets and packed hospital wards. When CNN visited Beijing, there were grieving family members who had been waiting more than a day to say goodbye to their loved ones.

An AP investigation showed that the way health authorities tally COVID-19 statistics have a clouded view as they apply a less transparent and shifting standard to how it’s meant to be.

But experts have repeatedly advised that authorities should err on the side of caution while counting deaths. Problems in death counts have raised suspicions in a number of countries.

“I do not think the village doctors or the 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.

“In China the messaging has to be really careful right now, since we will have a new year coming up and people are going to travel to the rural communities, so it’s going to be very important to inform the public that it’s coming,” says Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist and chief strategy officer at the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

One model released last week by the University of Hong Kong predicts up to 1 million deaths in a single year if social distancing policies are not maintained in China.

China’s state media outlets emphasize that the new Omicron variant only presents light symptoms similar to a common cold, but which contributes to vaccine hesitancy.

Sun Cai-un, an ebullient restaurant owner in Beijing who is intent on returning to her home village in the northern part of the country, said she would just set off some fireworks and have a good party and scare away the virus. I am planning on coming home because of Beijing’s ban on fireworks.

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 urban areas after supplies ran out in the first place.

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.

With the rapid spread of a novel illness in China last month, the WHO has become outspoken in their calls for reliable information, as officials grapple with Beijing’s tight control on data access throughout the Pandemic.

“The number they [are] willing to show the number of deaths is almost bordering on ridiculous,” says Ray Yip, an epidemiologist who founded the Center for Disease Control’s office in China in 2003.

The hospitals that NPR visited in Beijing were busy but orderly, with a few elderly patients lying in gurneys and being put into IV bags because there were no beds.

The health care system has held up well in large cities because migrant workers have only rural health insurance that can’t 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. “As a delivery guy you have to be a risk taker and be willing to die for your job.”

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.

According to both outlets, figures were presented at an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission on Wednesday. The NHC summary of Wednesday’s meeting said it delved into the treatment of patients affected by the new outbreak.

On Friday, a copy of what was purportedly the NHC meeting notes was circulated on Chinese social media and seen by CNN; the authenticity of the document has not been verified and the NHC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the Financial Times, the figures were presented to the officials by a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Chinese community doctors will administer Paxlovid to Covid-19 patients, and if so, what will they do? A news conference in Beijing

The figures are in stark contrast to the public data of the NHC, which reported just 62,592 symptomatic Covid cases in the first twenty days of December.

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

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.

Paxlovid remains the only foreign medicine to treat Covid that has been approved by China’s regulator for nationwide use, but access is extremely difficult to come by. When a Chinese healthcare platform offered the antiviral drug earlier this month, it sold out within hours.

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.

The emergency room doctor in Beijing told the People’s Daily that four of his colleagues did not have time to eat or drink. He said that they have been seeing a lot of patients.

A doctor in the emergency room told the newspaper he had worked despite being sick. “The number of patients is high, and with fewer medical staff, the pressure is multiplied,” said the doctor.

In a sign of the strain on Beijing’s medical system, hundreds of health professionals from across China have traveled to the city to assist medical centers.

For many Chinese nationals abroad, who have been unable to return or unwilling to endure the lengthy quarantine, the news meant they could finally go home — a bittersweet victory after much sacrifice.

Exiting the China border after a pandemic: How happy is it to see the end of the Taiwan crisis? — May Ma, a New York resident, said goodbye

The border remains largely closed to foreigners, apart from a limited number of business or family visits — though the government signaled Monday this could loosen, too.

“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 because of the deaths of her family members and her beloved pet dog.

Her family “missed (my graduation). They missed so many things,” she said. “And I also missed so many things for my family. All my friends, they got married during the pandemic. Some of them had babies. I feel like I missed everything, I missed the most important points in their lives.”

May Ma has been living in South Korea for the past three years. She said the scariest thing about the requirements is not knowing if she’d be able to return in time to say goodbye.

“It was the scariest thing because I didn’t know when I would be able to go back,” she said. I can finally see the end and I feel very happy.

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

China’s Border Frontier Quarantine Travel Recommendation – A Three-Year Peak on the Trip.com Website

China’s people are anticipating outbound travel. Most have not left the country in many years and are 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. The amount of searches for popular destinations increased tenfold within half an hour of the announcement, with many people looking for outbound group tours during the late January holiday season.

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.

A Chinese national in New York said that he felt like it was a mess. “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.”

On guard are some overseas destinations. The Malpensa airport in Milan, one of the biggest international airports in Italy, has been asked to conduct tests on Chinese arrivals 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 ’94: China’s return to zero-Covid after the first half of his third term as a leader

“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 bear waiting for a bit, there is hope after all.

It was meant to be a great year for China and its leader, as he began his second decade of power with a pledge to restore the nation to greatness.

In its tightly sealed, meticulously managed Olympic bubble, the ubiquitous face masks, endless spraying of disinfectant and rigorous daily testing paid-off. Any infected visitors arriving in the country were swiftly identified and their cases contained, allowing the Winter Olympics to run largely free of Covid even as the Omicron variant raged around the world.

The success added to the party’s narrative that its political system is superior to those of Western democracies in handling the pandemic – a message Xi had repeatedly driven home as he prepared for a third term in power.

Having tied himself so closely to zero-Covid, Xi was stuck in a trap of his own making. He was unable to leave it, because the risk of infections and deaths was too great a risk to take before his third term at the congress.

And so instead of vaccinating the elderly and bolstering ICU capacity, authorities wasted the next crucial months building larger quarantine facilities, rolling out more frequent mass testing, and imposing wider lockdowns that at one point affected more than 300 million people.

The death of several people in an apartment fire in the western city of Urumqi sparked public anger, which has been simmering for months. Many believed lockdown measures had hampered rescue efforts, despite official denials.

Protests erupted across the country, on a scale unseen in decades. On university campuses and the streets of major cities, crowds gathered to call for an end to incessant Covid tests and lockdowns, with some decrying censorship and demanding greater political freedoms.

The nationwide demonstrations posed a challenge to the president. By then, 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, with local governments running out of cash to pay huge lockdown bills.

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.

Over-the-counter cold and fever medicines – which had been restricted from purchase under zero-Covid – sold out instantly at pharmacies and on online shopping sites. There are huge lines outside of clinics and hospital emergency rooms. 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.

Chinese Covid epidemiology: Is there an outbreak in China? The European Union has urged countries to introduce a negative Covid test

The study said that the spread could be dramatically enhanced by the upcoming Spring Festival, which is a holiday that happens in January and coincides with the lunar new year.

“It is reasonable to speculate that the Omicron outbreak in Chinese mainland might appear in multiple waves, with re-appearance of new local surges possibly in late 2023,” the study said.

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 that have not received a tetanus vaccine and older than 60 years with anti-viral drugs.

The World Health Organization criticized China’s definition of what constituted a Covid death, and said they were under-represented in the severity of their Covid outbreak.

“There’s a lot more data that needs to be shared from China and additionally from around the world so that we can track this pandemic as we enter this fourth year,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on Covid, said Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the European Union “strongly encouraged” its member states to introduce a requirement for a negative Covid test for passengers traveling from China to the EU, according to a statement released by the Swedish presidency of the bloc.

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 Chinese have recently presented genomic data to a WHO advisory body. The variants detected there are known and have been circulating in other countries, with no new variant yet reported by the China CDC, the body said in a statement Wednesday.

She said that more information on the sequence of the country’s is needed so that deeper analyses can be done. The data of different flu viruses are available to be accessed with the help of the global initiative.

A Xenophobic Panic Before Admission to the United States: The Biden Administration’s Response to the Covid-19 Tests

Even though the C.D.C. requirements are not a nationality-based travel ban, history told me to brace for xenophobic panic. I didn’t need to wait long before the Biden administration swiftly rolled out a new policy requiring travelers from China to present negative Covid-19 tests before entering the United States.