Don’t meet elders on the Lunar New year holiday in china; read why

Key takeaways: 

• People are advised ‘don’t go home’ during the lunar new year vacation if older family members are not yet infected.

People in China have been alerted against travelling to see their elderly relatives during the lunar new year holiday. Covid rises rapidly through cities and into provincial and poorer places.

Prof Guo Jianwen, an associate of the state council’s outbreak prevention unit, asked people “don’t go home to see them” if old relatives had not yet been infected.

Chinese people are restricted from meeting elderly relatives: 

“You have all sorts of ways to show you care for them; you don’t necessarily have to get the virus to their home,” Guo said on Thursday.

The vacation period, which starts on 21 January, was supposed to be a comeback to festivals and travel after lifting most limitations in December. Still, instead, it is overlapping with a wave of infections.

Covid whips China: 

Health officers said the rise of infections had passed this week in several prominent regions and cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. But there are severe worries for regional places where health resources are more restricted, and older people are probably to be unvaccinated.

“The crisis in rural China is very murky,” stated Dr Chen Xi, an assistant teacher specialising in ageing and public health at Yale University. “We strongly feel rural China will get much worse as the spring festival comes.”

Reports from people in rural regions across China of mass infections, deaths, and healthcare woes, including areas where officers say conditions are yet to rise. One woman in Shandong said her parents had not been vaccinated because they did not rely on Chinese vaccines and were now worried about going outside as the virus spread through their village.