Chinese New Year Travel A Risk To Covid-19 Outbreaks

Train stations were swamped by people rushing back to their villages to celebrate Chinese New Year before Covid-19 times.

Before the pandemic hits, the biggest annual human migration happened in China every year during the Chinese New Year period when billions of Chinese citizens returning to their home villages from the major cities. This year due to signs of outbreaks from Hebei to Heilongjiang in the north, provincial authorities are trying to control the spread by curtailing travel in the festive season.

The plan by provincial cadres, who are urging migrant workers to “remain in cities, stay in work,” is aimed at reducing transmissions of the virus while boosting the economy at the same time.

Authorities are still fighting hard to flatten the spikes in infections, more than two weeks after China was hit by Covid-19 outbreak since early this year.

The spread of the coronavirus in rural areas of two provinces of Hebei and Heilongjiang had been under the watch of authorities for weeks until the pathogen crept into cities and provincial capitals. This week the outbreaks have pushed China’s nationwide tally of daily new cases to above 100, the highest in the past nine months after Beijing lifted the lockdown on Wuhan.

The National Health Commission (NHC) reported 103 fresh cases across the country in the past 24 hours to Friday morning.

Most of these cases were identified in repeated rounds of aggressive testing in Hebei, Heilongjiang and Jilin. The case identification system of China is different from other countries in that they do not count asymptomatic carriers as confirmed cases, a practice that has left the NHC open to criticism as the West continues to accuse China of manipulating the official figures released to the public.

The NHC’s nationwide map tracking infections on Friday red-flagged Beijing’s Daxing district, home to the capital’s sprawling new airport, and two districts in Hebei’s provincial capital of Shijiazhuang as Covid high-risk areas where the strictest lockdowns and entry and exit bans apply.

Three other smaller cities across Hebei, Heilongjiang and Jilin are also classified as hot spots of the virus. Provinces and municipalities are directed to share information and coordinate measures to curtail long-distance trips by migrant workers and others to avoid a nationwide travel rush in the run-up to the Chinese New Year celebration in February.

Chinese migrant workers who are planning to go home to the countryside have to first obtain negative test results before their trips or they risk being fined or detained.

The new rules stipulate that, after getting back to their rural homes, they will also have to undergo 14 days of “soft quarantine” with no interactions with anyone outside their families or households.

Police will be mobilized and dispatched to villages and towns to enforce monitoring and to catch anyone breaking the rules.

These measures are necessary to stem the virus from spreading into China’s vast rural areas which are poorly-funded to manage disease control. 

Hospitals and clinics in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other major cities in southern Guangdong province have been swamped by migrant workers for testing since Thursday.

They need their negative test results to book train tickets home. The growing hoards have sparked fears of infections and local police are forced to implement crowd control measures.

More than 30 million workers from other parts of China are employed by factories in Guangdong and many are eager to go home in the Lunar New Year. That amount of people is more than the entire population of Australia!

In a desperate move to discourage people from travelling, railway operators and airlines like China Southern and Shenzhen Airlines are asked to slash departures from Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Both carriers have cancelled most flights to Beijing and Shijiazhuang. China Railway Corp’s Guangzhou branch has also rescheduled departures to make fewer seats available.

Governments and employers in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and other coastal provinces are also doling out aid and incentives to lure workers to stay, with a whole range of giveaways, coupons and even cash handouts of up to thousands of yuan on offer. 

Other incentives to encourage people to stay put in the major cities are free rides on public transport, free admission to local tourist attractions as well as a lucky draw with prizes which includes luxury sedans and iPhones etc. 

The latest “remain in city, stay in work” campaign is expected to generate more growth for the Chinese economy, with machinery humming and giveaway coupons encouraging increase of consumption.

China’s GDP is projected to grow as much as 7% in January and February 2021. In the final quarter of 2020, China’s economy expanded by 6.5%, highest in the pandemic hit world!  

China Claims Its Vaccines Are Far More Superior Than Western Countries

China recently claimed that it was far ahead in the global race to find vaccines to stop the Covid-19 pandemic, with a handful of promising homegrown candidates either wrapping up their final-stage clinical trials or being administered in pilot inoculation schemes.

Yet reality shows that China appears to be lagging behind most Western powers as the vaccine competition heads into the final leg of regulatory approval and universal injections across the population. Both the US and UK have commenced vaccinating their citizens while Australia has brought forward their target from end of March to end of February 2021. With such programs being kick started across both sides of the Atlantic, piling pressure on Beijing.

 

Towards the end of 2020, Chinese public health watchdogs have rushed through to cut red tape and get official approval, with some conditions, for the sale of an attenuated vaccine from the Beijing-based China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of the state-owned SinoPharm.

While granting its “conditional approval” on Wednesday, the National Medical Products Administration said its evaluation found the vaccine to be 79.34% effective and that its protection far outweighed any potential risks or side effects.

The watchdog further added that SinoPharm should diligently follow up with the drug’s wider use for post-approval assessments of its effectiveness. 

The National Health Commission (NHC) also assured China’s 1.3 billion citizens on Thursday of free and voluntary shots, albeit without a definitive timeframe.

 

NHC vice-director Zeng Yixin, Beijing’s point man on vaccine development and administration, told a State Council press conference on Friday morning that they would adopt a “phased approach” to first take care of senior citizens and those with underlying conditions, before gradually expanding to cover the masses.

Another assuring pledge from Zeng was that, while noting forming meaningful herd immunity would only require about 60% of the population – in China’s context, about 780 million people – to receive jabs, he said top leaders would beseech each and everyone to be vaccinated, given the “proven safety and efficacy” of these indigenous drugs.

The NHC also added that the other five homemade vaccines, from three technological paths, are nearing the end of their respective third-stage trials at home and abroad. 

 

Earlier this month, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain approved SinoPharm’s registration applications for sale in the two Middle Eastern countries, while Brazil and Turkey have also accredited the high efficacy rate of another attenuated vaccine developed by Sinovac, a listed pharmaceutical firm also based in Beijing.

While clearing all the regulatory hurdles for more Chinese vaccines to hit the market and enticing its citizens with a top-down, no-one-left-behind free immunization drive, the NHC has also criticized the safety of some Western drugs developed with less verified techniques.

The messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines researched by Moderna as well as Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, which will also be marketed in China via a Shanghai-based distributor, have been called into question by the chief of China’s National Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gao Fu, director of the Chinese CDC, reportedly said mRNA vaccines were being injected into healthy people across the United Kingdom, the United States and other parts of the West for the first time and such a large-scale roll-out was not without its risks.

Gao went so far as to suggest that Chinese authorities would not hasten its review and allow the mRNA drug to be used on such a massive scale as seen across the West.

The mRNA vaccines being progressively rolled out in the West use a copy of a natural chemical called messenger RNA to induce an immune response. They transfect molecules of synthetic RNA into immunity cells to build the viral protein that would normally be produced by a pathogen or a cancer cell.

These protein molecules stimulate an adaptive immune response to teach the body how to identify and destroy the corresponding pathogen, like the novel coronavirus.

In comparison, attenuated vaccines from SinoPharm and Sinovac use diluted and detoxified viruses to trigger an immune response, and since they are developed using existing, time-tested platforms and techniques, they are believed to be safer.

 

It is believed that by the end of the first half of 2021, Chinese people will be able to choose from homemade attenuated vaccines, likely the ones on offer for free, and the West’s mRNA alternatives.

Residents in Hong Kong and Singapore can also choose between Chinese and Western drugs in mass inoculation schemes, as both cities have placed orders with Sinovac, Pfizer and other suppliers.

Still, the global scramble for vaccines means tight supplies and production and distribution bottlenecks, as more countries count down to mass immunization.

中国最近声称在研发新冠肺炎（Covid-19）的疫苗已遥遥领先其他西方国家。

然而现实证明，随着疫苗研发还需监管部门的批准才能对全民普遍注射，中国在这方面似乎落后于大多数西方国家。美国和英国都已开始为它们的公民接种疫苗，而澳大利亚则提前它们原定的目标。随着大西洋两岸开始实施此类计划，北京目前深受尽快推出疫苗的压力。

国家卫生委员会（NHC）周四向13亿中国公民保证疫苗将会是免费而且人民可自愿决定是否被注射，尽管没有明确的时间表。

中国政府将分阶段注射疫苗，首先照顾老年人和有病的人，然后才逐步扩大覆盖整个社会群众。

中国也把目标放远世界。本月初，阿拉伯联合酋长国和巴林批准了SinoPharm在两个中东国家出售的注册申请，而巴西和土耳其也认可了Sinovac开发的另一种疫苗的高效率。

在推广中国疫苗的同时，NHC也批评了一些未经验证的西方疫苗的安全措施。

China Blocks WHO

China has yet to explain why it delayed approval for a World Health Organization (WHO) team of experts to visit the country, significantly at a time when state media publish claims that the coronavirus pandemic started elsewhere.

The WHO team’s members were supposed to arrive in Beijing this week and possibly make a field visit to Wuhan, where Covid-19 cases apparently first emerged a little more than a year ago and before the disease began its lethal global spread.

The unexpected delays triggered today rare criticism from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said he was “deeply disappointed” by the delay in issuing visas for the team.

Ghebreyesus said that the 10-member group could not enter China for an epidemiological survey of the novel coronavirus, a key part of the WHO’s endeavor to ascertain the likely origins of the respiratory disease.

He said the infectious disease experts, led by food safety and zoonotic diseases scientist Peter Ben Embarek, were still waiting for their visas to travel to China.      

Reports indicate Embarek made a sortie to the country in July and convinced Beijing to open its doors to WHO personnel to conduct a prognosis probe.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Tuesday in response to a media question that she had “no new information” on the WHO team’s trip and itinerary.

Instead, Hua reiterated Beijing’s latest line, first purveyed by Foreign Minister Wang Yi, that “more signs and studies worldwide” had suggested Covid-19 could have “multiple sources” and that the pandemic had erupted globally across “multiple locations” since the second half of 2019.

Hua said related surveys have indicated a much earlier emergence of the pathogen in many more places than previously thought. She also hoped other countries could make “joint efforts” with the WHO to trace Covid-19 to its source. 

“We hope scientists can uphold professionalism and truth to find [Covid-19] origins worldwide, and that other countries can cooperate with and assist [the WHO] like what we have been doing since day one,” claimed Hua.

While several WHO officials and experts like Embarek were indeed allowed into China in 2020, Wuhan was glaringly and constantly missing on their Beijing-approved itineraries.

It’s not clear yet that the delay in the WHO expert team’s arrival reflects a change in policy by Beijing.

In December, the state-run nationalistic Global Times revealed a WHO “advance team” could go to Wuhan in January to inspect a wet market trading in exotic wildlife in the city that is believed to be a possible origin of the virus.

The paper also cited WHO officials as saying that all team members from Japan, Qatar, Denmark, Russia and others would first be put in quarantine in Beijing for 14 days. It added that an “open, fair” WHO investigation would help debunk the “mudslinging, fake news and conspiracy theories about the ‘China virus’” being spread by some American politicians, not least outgoing US President Donald Trump. 

“Wuhan was the first city, via Beijing, to have notified the WHO of the virus and an outbreak since the end of 2019 and well into January 2020, but that does not necessarily mean Wuhan was the source,” said the paper, a sister publication of the top Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily.

A source with Shanghai’s Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention told Asia Times that one possible reason behind the delayed trip could be the outbreaks of the virus hitting Hebei province since the New Year.

He said the National Health Commission has scrambled a contingent of top virologists to the northern province to trace hidden cases and contain any spillovers that may affect Beijing. Some of these experts originally planned to accompany their WHO counterparts during their trip in China, including to Wuhan. Hebei has reported 34 local infections since Tuesday.

“With cases flaring up again near Beijing and the national health authority responding to the big resurgence, clearly receiving a WHO team is no longer a top priority,” said the source. 

Reports indicate that one WHO expert decided to cancel his flights and return to Geneva, where the WHO is headquartered, fearing he could be left cooling his heels at the airport after landing in China.

Another expert is now reportedly stuck in a transit county, apparently waiting for word on the team’s visas.

Xi Jinping visited Wuhan during the Pandemic in 2020.

In the meantime, Chinese and Western officials continue to trade Covid-related accusations and recriminations.

US President Trump again used the term “China virus” in his New Year’s speech. In China, a new narrative from a senior Xinhua editor is also making the rounds on social media.

This comes after Zhao Lijian, Hua’s colleague at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, leveled outrageous allegations at the US military, claiming they first bought the virus to Wuhan.

Xiong Lei, a deputy director of Xinhua News Agency’s special feature division, posted on social media what she claimed were findings of her investigative reporting into a Harvard-led DNA sampling project that was held in eastern Anhui province in the 1990s.

In her post, Xiong alleged that the number of DNA samples collected during the Harvard project in Anhui, reportedly funded by the US National Institutes of Health, was three times larger than the amount approved by the Chinese government and that two types of samples had been used for respiratory disease studies.   

She went so far as to suggest that the SARS pandemic of 2003, which mainly hit China, and the Covid-19 contagion in Wuhan, could have something to do with the Harvard School of Public Health’s collection of DNA and biological samples from the Chinese population.

“China has never collected DNA samples from foreign populations. So it’s preposterous for some in the US government and institutions, which collect such samples from overseas, to suggest that the Covid virus could have been engineered and manufactured in a bio lab in Wuhan,” said Xiong.

Harvard has repeatedly denied all accusations when Xiong first linked its Anhui project to SARS a few years ago, stressing the project, initiated by an associate professor of public health who hailed from China, had been approved by Beijing before it started in that province.

Nonetheless, many Chinese netizens believe Xiong’s claims have “plausible elements” given her capacity as a Xinhua senior editor and her father’s background as a spy chief in Mao Zedong’s Red Army during China’s civil war in the 1940s.

Source: Asia Times

至今中国尚未解释为什么它会推迟批准世界卫生组织（WHO）专家访问该国，耐人寻味的是中国官方媒体选择在这个时候发表有关冠状病毒大流行可能开始于其他地方的言论。

世卫组织团队的成员原定于本周抵达北京，并可能对武汉进行实地调查。武汉市显然在一年多前就出现了Covid-19病例，当时该病尚未开始蔓延到全世界。

对于这次的延误，世卫组织总干事特德罗斯·阿德诺姆·盖布里亚索斯今天罕见的表达不满和批评，他为该团队签发签证的延误“深感失望”。

Ghebreyesus说，这个由10名成员组成的小组无法进入中国进行新型冠状病毒的流行病学调查，这是WHO确定这病毒起源的关键部分。

他说，由食品安全和人畜共患病科学家彼得·本·恩巴雷克（Peter Ben Embarek）领导的传染病专家仍在等待签证前往中国。     

报告显示，埃巴雷克于7月份对该国进行了一次出击，并说服北京向世卫组织人员敞开大门，进行预后调查。

 

中国外交部发言人华春莹周二在回应媒体提问时说，她“对世卫组织医疗队的行程和行程没有任何新信息”。

相反，华重申了外交部长王毅首先提出的北京最新路线，即“全球范围内的更多迹象和研究”表明，Covid-19可能具有“多种来源”，并且自第二次爆发以来，该流行病自从2019的上半年已在全球“多个地点”爆发。 

华说，相关调查显示，病原体的出现比以前想象的要早得多。她还希望其他国家可以与世界卫生组织“共同努力”，将Covid-19追溯到其来源。

“我们希望科学家们能够秉承专业精神和真理，在全球范围内找到[Covid-19]的起源，其他国家也可以像我们从第一天开始所做的那样与[WHO]合作和协助，” Hua说道。

 

尽管确实有2020年世卫组织的几名官员和专家（如Embarek）获准进入中国，但武汉却没有在被批准的行程当中。

目前尚不清楚，这次世卫组织专家小组行程的耽误是否反映了北京方面的政策变化。

 

去年12月，国营的民族主义《环球时报》透露，世卫组织的“前进小组”可能会在一月份前往武汉检查该市野生动物的湿市场，据信这可能是该病毒的起源。

该报还援引世界卫生组织官员的话说，来自日本，卡塔尔，丹麦，俄罗斯和其他国家的所有小组成员将首先在北京隔离14天。它补充说，世卫组织进行的“公开，公正”调查将有助于揭穿一些美国政客，尤其是即将卸任的美国总统唐纳德·特朗普所散布的“有关'中国病毒'的虚假新闻和阴谋论”。

该报的姐妹说：“自2019年底至2020年1月，武汉是第一个通过北京向世卫组织通报该病毒和疫情的城市，但这并不一定意味着武汉是疫源。”共产党最高喉舌《人民日报》的出版。

 

上海市疾病预防控制中心的消息人士告诉《亚洲时报》，这次旅行推迟的一个可能原因可能是自新年以来该病毒在河北省的爆发。

他说，国家卫生委员会已将一大批顶尖病毒学家派到北部省份，以追踪隐藏的病例，并遏制任何可能影响北京的外溢。这些专家中的一些最初计划与世卫组织同行在中国旅行期间一起，包括前往武汉。自周二以来，河北已报告34例局部感染。

消息人士说：“随着病例在北京附近再次爆发，国家卫生部门必须尽快作出反应，显然，世卫组织的检查工作已经不再是中国目前的首要关键事物。”

报告表明，一位世卫组织专家决定取消其航班，返回日内瓦的世卫组织总部，因为担心他在中国着陆后可能会被困在在机场。

据报道，另一名专家现在被困在过境县，显然正在等待有关该队签证的消息。

同时，中国和西方官员继续交换与Covid有关的指控和指责。

美国总统特朗普在新年演讲中再次使用“中国病毒”一词。在中国，新华社资深编辑的新叙事也在社交媒体上进行。

在此之前，华外交部的华同事赵立建对美国军方提出了严厉的指控，声称美国才是首次把病毒带到武汉。