China has suspended or shut down more than 1,000 social media accounts criticizing the government’s policies regarding the Covid-19 outbreak as the country moves to open up more.
The popular Sina Weibo social media platform says it has addressed 12,854 violations, including attacks on experts, academics and medical workers, and temporarily or permanently banned 1,120 accounts. Did.
The ruling Communist Party, which relied heavily on the medical community to justify stringent lockdowns, quarantine measures and mass testing, abruptly abandoned almost all of it last month, leading to a surge in new cases. You’ve stretched your medical resources to their limits. The party does not allow direct criticism and imposes severe restrictions on freedom of speech.
Sina Weibo said in a statement on Thursday that the company “will step up investigation and cleanup of all kinds of illegal content and continue to create a harmonious and friendly community environment for the majority of users.” rice field.
Criticism has mostly focused on unrestricted travel restrictions that have forced people to stay home for weeks, sometimes not getting enough food or medical care. The requirement that persons, or persons who may have had contact with such persons, be confined and observed in field hospitals, where overcrowding, poor diet and hygiene are commonly noted, was also diverged. rice field.
The social and economic costs ultimately sparked rare street protests in Beijing and other cities, and may have influenced the party’s decision to quickly ease the toughest measures.
China now faces surge in cases and hospitalizations in major cities, bracing for further expansion into greenfields As the Lunar New Year travel rush begins, We are planning to start in the near future. International flights are still down, but officials expect domestic rail and air travel to double around the same time last year, approaching the number of holiday periods in 2019 before the pandemic hit.
The Ministry of Transport on Friday called on travelers to reduce travel and gatherings, especially those involving the elderly, pregnant women, small children and those with underlying medical conditions.
People using public transport are also asked to wear masks and pay special attention to health and personal hygiene, Vice Minister Suh Chengguang said at a press conference.
Nonetheless, China is moving forward with plans to end mandatory quarantines for people arriving from abroad starting Sunday.
The city of Beijing will also lift the requirement that students in the city’s schools must test negative for Covid-19 to enter campus when classes resume after the holidays on February 13. . Schools will be allowed to move classes online in the event of a new outbreak, but must return to in-person instruction as soon as possible, the city’s education department said in a statement Friday.
However, a very limited amount of basic data such as the end of mass testing, deaths, infections, severe cases, and Possible appearance of new subspecies urged governments to do so Establish virus testing requirements For travelers from China.
The World Health Organization has also expressed concern about the lack of data from China, but the United States requires travelers from China to have negative test results within 48 hours of departure.
Chinese health authorities publish daily numbers of new infections, severe cases and deaths, but these figures only include officially confirmed cases. A very narrow definition of Covid-related death.
Officials said they were no longer able to provide a complete picture of the state of the latest outbreak as the government ended compulsory testing and allowed people with mild symptoms to self-test and recover at home. I’m here.
On Sunday, the National Health Board reported 10,681 new domestic cases, bringing the country’s total number of confirmed cases to 482,057. He also had three new deaths reported in the last 24 hours, bringing his total to 5,267.
The figure is just a fraction of the figures released by the United States, which has over one million deaths out of some 101 million cases.
But they are also much smaller than estimates released by some local governments.The east coast province of Zhejiang said on Tuesday it was seeing about 1 million new cases a day. rice field.
China says the testing requirements imposed by foreign governments (most recently Germany and Sweden) are not based on science. Threatening unspecified countermeasures. Its spokesperson said the situation was under control and rejected accusations of a lack of readiness to reopen.
When variants emerge in outbreaks, they are discovered by viral gene sequencing.
Since the pandemic began, China has shared 4,144 sequences with GISAID, a global platform for coronavirus data. That’s just 0.04% of the number of reported cases, more than one-hundredth that of the United States and nearly one-fourth that of neighboring Mongolia.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong also plans to reopen some of its border crossings with mainland China on Sunday, allowing tens of thousands of people to cross each day without being quarantined.
The semi-autonomous southern Chinese city has been hit hard by the virus, with land and sea border crossings with the mainland closed for almost three years. Despite the risks, the reopening is expected to provide a much-needed boost to Hong Kong’s tourism and retail sectors.
