China COVID-19 Update: China has suspended or closed the social media accounts of more than 1,000 critics of the government’s policies over the COVID-19 outbreak, as the country moves to open up further. The popular Sina Weibo social media platform said it has addressed 12,854 violations, including attacks on experts, scholars and medical workers, and issued temporary or permanent bans to 1,120 accounts.
The ruling Communist Party had relied largely on the medical community to justify its draconian lockdown, quarantine measures and mass testing, almost all of which it abruptly abandoned last month, prompting a surge in new cases that strained medical resources. stretched to its limits. The party does not allow direct criticism and imposes strict limits on free speech.
In a statement on Thursday (Jan 5), Sina Weibo said the “company” will continue to investigate and clean up all kinds of illegal content, and create a harmonious and friendly community environment for the majority of users.
Criticism has largely focused on open-ended travel restrictions, which have confined people to their homes for weeks, sometimes without adequate food or medical care. Anger was also expressed at the requirement that anyone who potentially tests positive or has been in contact with such a person be confined to a field hospital for observation, where overcrowding, poor food and sanitation are common. was cited.
The social and economic costs eventually prompted rare street protests in Beijing and other cities, likely influencing the party’s decision to rapidly ease the strict measures.
China is now facing a surge in the number of cases and hospitalizations in major cities and is set to spread to less developed regions in the coming days with the start of the Lunar New Year travel rush. While international flights are still down, officials say they expect domestic rail and air travel to double from the same period last year, bringing the overall total closer to the 2019 holiday period before the pandemic hit. The numbers will come.
The Transport Ministry on Friday (Jan 7) called on commuters to minimize visits and gatherings, especially if they involve elderly people, pregnant women, young children and people with underlying conditions.
People using public transportation are also urged to wear masks and pay special attention to their health and personal hygiene, Vice Minister Xu Chengguang told reporters at a briefing.
Nonetheless, China is moving ahead with plans to end mandatory quarantine for people arriving from abroad starting on Sunday.
Beijing is also planning to drop the requirement for students in the city’s schools to have a negative COVID-19 test to enter campus when classes resume after the February 13 holiday. The city’s education bureau said in a statement Friday that schools would be allowed to move classes online in the event of a new outbreak, but would have to return to in-person instruction as soon as possible.
However, the end of large-scale testing, the extremely limited amount of basic data such as the number of deaths, infections and severe cases, and the potential emergence of new variants prompted governments to establish virus testing requirements for travelers from China Is.
The World Health Organization has also expressed concern about the lack of data from China, while the US requires a negative test result for travelers from China within 48 hours of departure.
Chinese health officials publish daily counts of new cases, severe cases and deaths, but those numbers include only officially confirmed cases and use a very narrow definition of COVID-related deaths.
Officials say that since the government ended mandatory testing and allowed people with mild symptoms to test themselves and rest at home, it can no longer provide a full picture of the state of the latest outbreak.
On Sunday, the National Health Commission reported 10,681 new domestic cases, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 482,057. Three new deaths were also recorded in the last 24 hours, taking the total number to 5,267.
The numbers are a fraction of those announced by the US, which has put its death toll at more than 1 million out of some 101 million cases.
But they are also far short of the projections being released by some local governments. Zhejiang province on the east coast said on Tuesday it was seeing about one million new cases a day.
China has said testing requirements being imposed by foreign governments – most recently Germany and Sweden – are not science-based and has threatened unspecified countermeasures. Its spokesmen have said the situation is under control, and dismiss allegations of a lack of preparation to reopen.
If a variant emerges in an outbreak, it is found through genetic sequencing of the virus.
Since the start of the pandemic, China has shared 4,144 sequences with GISAID, a global platform for coronavirus data. This is only 0.04% of the number of reported cases—a rate 100 times lower than in the United States and almost four times lower than in neighboring Mongolia.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong also plans to reopen some of its border crossings with mainland China on Sunday and allow tens of thousands of people to cross daily without quarantine.
The semi-autonomous southern Chinese city has been hit hard by the virus and its land and sea border posts with the mainland have been closed for nearly three years. Despite the risks, the reopening is expected to provide a much-needed boost to Hong Kong’s tourism and retail sectors.
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