BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL
WORLD
HARRY LI WANTS TO SPEND THE LUNAR NEW YEAR holiday in his home village in northern China’s Hebei province, but he is afraid of spending more than 12 hours on crowded trains and buses lest he bring COVID-19 to his elderly parents, who have not been vaccinated. “It’s been three years since I’ve been home [for Lunar New Year],” says Li, a 20-year-old law student in Shanghai. “I was vaccinated nine months ago, but everyone around me is still getting sick.”
Many Chinese face a similar conundrum. For decades, the Lunar New Year holiday was renowned as humanity’s largest annual migration, when hundreds of millions travel from China’s freewheeling coast back to ancestral villages to feast and toast with elderly kin. During the pandemic, strict controls and state-led incentive schemes put the brakes on holiday travel. But on Dec. 9, China began completely dismantling its testing and quarantine apparatus, allowing the virus to spread like wildfire across the world’s largest population of 1.4 billion.
Officials, who have stopped counting infections, said on Jan. 14 that nearly 60,000 people with COVID-19 died from Dec. 8 to Jan. 12. Still, that figure includes only victims who died in the hospital following a pneumonia diagnosis and excludes all those with underlying health conditions. Meanwhile, social media images of crowded hospital wards, overflowing morgues, and long queues outside crematoriums and funeral parlors point to a burgeoning health crisis. Around 900 million people in China had been infected as of Jan. 11, according to a study by Peking University, or 64% of the population. Independent death-toll projections range from 1 million to 2 million.
On Jan. 14, Jiao Yahui, a prominent health official, said the “national emergency peak has passed.” But Yanzhong Huang, a public-health expert at the New York City-based Council on Foreign Relations, says estimates should be taken “with a grain of salt.” “With the dismantling of the testing regime, they cannot be expected to provide accurate information.”
Much hinges on what unfolds during the weeklong holiday. Lunar New Year officially starts Jan. 22, but for many, the grand peregrination begins days earlier. The combination of millions of people crammed onto public transport traveling to a predominantly elderly, undervaccinated population in villages with rudimentary health care threatens to be a perfect storm. Professor Guo Jianwen, a member of Ch
