China assures that the peak of serious covid cases has passed, despite the fact that the country is preparing this Friday for parties for the Lunar New Year before which the number of displacements has grown by 55% year-on-year and in which the spread of covid through rural areas is feared.
The health authorities of the asian country They assured this Thursday that on January 5 they reached the maximum number of patients admitted with severe symptoms of covid-19, figures that fell to 44.3% as of January 17.
In the case of visits to care departments for patients with fever, the ceiling was reached on December 23, with a drop of up to 94% between that date and January 17, according to the Department of Medical Emergencies. of the National Health Commission.
Admissions to emergency rooms fell by up to 44% after reaching their maximum numbers on January 2, also being that 95% of consultations and 85% of patients admitted to hospital centers were not related to the covid .
Travel surges ahead of Lunar New Year
Some figures that have to be faced at the beginning of the Lunar New Year holidays, which in 2023 fall between January 21 and 27, and the 40-day period known as ‘chunyun’, which marks the largest annual migration of the world.
China It registered a growth in the number of trips of 55.1% compared to the previous year, in the first festivities of this type in two years that are celebrated without the restrictions on mobility typical of the ‘zero covid’ policy.
The dismantling of these measures allowed 46.1 million trips to be reached this Thursday, which, although they represent the aforementioned year-on-year increase, are numbers that are still 44% lower than the data for the same dates in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, local media reported.
Road trips were recorded at 35 million, an interannual increase of 65.3%, while those made by plane and train registered 1.3 million and 8.9 million passengers respectively, 38.1% and 27.6% more than in 2022, although all these percentages are still below those collected in 2019.
A messenger RNA vaccine against Omicron
Faced with so many displacements, the authorities chinese recently asked localities to prepare for a possible spread of the virus in rural areas, where Chinese citizens usually return for the holidays, in the face of “relative scarcity of health resources”.
Some health resources that in the future can count on a vaccine messenger RNA to combat the omicron variant of the Chinese laboratory Sinopharm, which received approval from the National Administration of Medical Products to start clinical trials.
Sinopharm’s vaccine would be the second of the messenger RNA type developed by a Chinese laboratory that receives the approval of the Chinese authorities for trials.
According to a recent study of the Peking Universityaround 900 million people have already been infected by the covid, in addition to accounting for some 60,000 people who died from the disease between December 8 and January 12, according to official figures.
The number of deaths from covid in China during the holidays for Lunar New YearDue to the high number of trips, it could reach 36,000 daily, according to a study by the British company Airfinity, a health sector analyst.
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