The president of China said, this Saturday, that “the light of hope is coming”, when the country registers an increase in cases of Covid-19, after the end of sanitary restrictions.
Three years after the appearance of the first cases of the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus, at the end of December, in Wuhan (center), China ended, without prior notice, the “covid zero” policy, on December 7 .
Since the restrictions were lifted, Chinese hospitals are inundated with patients, mostly elderly, crematoriums are overflowing and many pharmacies are running out of fever medicine.
“The prevention and control of the epidemic has entered a new phase. We are still in a difficult moment”, but “the light of hope is ahead”, Xi Jinping said, in the New Year message broadcast on Chinese state television.
This is the second comment on the epidemic this week by the Chinese leader, who had called for measures to “effectively protect people’s lives” on Monday.
The country reported more than 7,000 new cases and one death related to Covid-19 on Saturday, in a population of 1.4 billion. These numbers are largely underestimates and seem totally out of step with the reality on the ground, according to the France-Presse news agency.
Despite this situation, the authorities will end, as of next Sunday, the mandatory quarantines upon arrival in China and will authorize the Chinese to travel abroad.
As a precaution, several European countries, including France and Italy, as well as the United States and Japan, have announced that they will require negative tests for passengers arriving from China. Canada and Morocco followed suit.
Starting Thursday, Ottawa will require a negative test for all travelers arriving from China. The measure is “in response to the outbreak of Covid-19 in the People’s Republic of China and due to the limited epidemiological and genome sequencing data available on these cases,” the Canadian government announced in a statement.
Morocco prefers to prohibit direct entry into the territory “to all travelers, regardless of their nationality” from China.
The ban comes into effect from Tuesday, “until further notice,” according to a statement from the Moroccan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
For their part, the member states of the European Union will discuss a common response on Wednesday, announced Saturday Sweden, which has held the semi-annual presidency of the EU since Sunday.
“It is important that we implement measures quickly,” the Swedish government said in a statement.
The precautionary measures taken by several states “are understandable” given the lack of information provided by Beijing, said the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Ghebreyesus.
This is not the opinion of the European branch of Airports Council International (ACI), an organization that represents more than 500 airports in 55 European countries.
“These unilateral actions contradict all the experience and evidence obtained in the last three years (…) Imposing more restrictions on travelers to this country is not scientifically justified or based on risk,” according to a statement from ACI.
Beijing maintains that its statistics on Covid-19 have always been transparent since the beginning of the pandemic.
The WHO announced late Friday that it had met with Chinese officials to discuss the outbreak.
“WHO reiterated its call for the regular exchange of specific data in real time on the epidemiological situation, including more data on genetic sequencing and on the impact of the disease, including hospitalizations, intensive care unit admissions and deaths,” it said. in a sentence.
It also requested data on vaccines and immunization status, especially among vulnerable people and people over 60, it added.
China’s “zero covid” policy has enabled extensive population protection since 2020, thanks to widespread testing, strict monitoring of movements, and mandatory confinement and quarantine with case detection.
These measures, which largely isolated China from the rest of the world, dealt a heavy blow to the world’s second-largest economy. In recent months, they have sparked growing public frustration and unusual anti-government protests.
Source: Observadora
