Nearly 90 percent of residents in China’s third most populous province have already contracted COVID-19, a senior health official said Monday, in the latest description of how the virus ripped through the world’s largest population in mere weeks.
In Henan, which had a population approaching 99 million people according to provincial data published in May 2022, the outbreak had already passed its peak and infections were trending downward, said Kan Quancheng, head of the health commission in the central Chinese province.
“As of January 6, 2023, the province’s COVID infection rate was 89 percent,” Kan told a press conference. The Omicron subvariant BA.5.2 remained dominant, he said, with infections reaching 89.1 percent of urban and 88.9 percent of rural residents.
The provincial health authority believes the region’s cases peaked on December 19, based on visits to fever clinics. “The number of new infections per day is expected to remain low by the end of this month,” Kan said.
The official estimate means some 88 million people have or have had COVID. Henan’s 99 million population ranks third among China‘s provinces, behind southern Guangdong’s 127 million and eastern Shandong’s 102 million. China has a population of 1.4 billion people.
The central government in Beijing abruptly abandoned its years-long zero-COVID policy on December 7 after stringent lockdowns and near-daily mass testing had throttled the Chinese economy and strained the public’s patience.
As the world’s largest outbreak spread unabated, Chinese officials acknowledged that the extent of the country’s COVID surge became difficult to track. As late as the final week of November, Beijing also had a sizable immunity deficit to make up, including an estimated 37 million over-60s who had yet to receive a booster shot and 28 million in the age group who hadn’t been vaccinated at all.
Kan, Henan’s health chief, said his province led China’s vaccination work, with nearly 93.6 percent of 60- to 79-year-olds and 80.3 percent of over-80s boosted.
On January 8, one month after shifting away from President Xi Jinping‘s signature public health strategy, China dismantled the final piece of its pandemic policy by downgrading COVID from a Class A to a Class B infectious disease, paving the way for the scrapping of quarantine for inbound travelers, although preflight PCR requirements remain.
The move came exactly two weeks before the Lunar New Year break officially begins on January 21, and one day after the start of the 40-day period of mass migration known as “chunyun,” when hundreds of millions of people will travel home or abroad in the holiday rush.
China’s Transport Ministry said on Friday that it expected more than 2 billion passengers to take trips during chunyun, which officially concludes on February 15. That’s nearly double 2022’s figure but still only 70 percent of 2019’s pre-COVID levels.
The reopening of the world’s most populous country after three years comes amid some friction between Beijing and the World Health Organization, which believes China’s pandemic data is underrepresenting the true scale of the outbreak, especially in terms of fatalities. The U.N. health agency has repeatedly asked for more transparency.
Modeling by British health analytics company Airfinity suggests China’s COVID surge could be killing more people per day than during America’s deadly winter wave of January 2021, before effective vaccines were widely available to the public.
Airfinity estimated Monday that 18,900 people were dying from the virus in China every day, for a total of 269,400 deaths from December 1 alone. The group expects the country’s daily deaths to reach 25,000 a day roughly 10 days after infections peak on January 13, with the death toll likely to reach 1.7 million by the end of April.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported three new COVID deaths on Monday for January 8, for an official death toll of 5,272 since the start of the pandemic.
China has rejected suggestions it hasn’t been forthcoming with its statistics, or that its decision to exit zero-COVID somehow represents a policy failure after having afforded the Chinese public more than two years of relative normalcy.
Writing in the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper on Sunday, the central government’s pen name “Zhong Yin” argued that China made “important contributions to the global fight” against COVID. To smear China’s achievements, it said, was “disrespectful to the facts, disrespectful to science and irresponsible to history.”
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