Amid massive COVID-19 surge, China warns people against visiting their elderly relatives

As the Chinese New Year comes around the corner, the plans of festivities have been quelled by COVID-19 waves in the country with a new worry dominating the people of China. Should the Chinese public risk spreading coronavirus to their elderly relatives as they plan to return to their hometowns for the holidays? The Year of the Rabbit begins on January 21. 

According to The Strait Times, WHO warned that the move could inflame a raging outbreak. The Lunar New Year holiday comes after China last month abandoned a strict anti-virus regime of mass lockdowns that prompted widespread frustration and boiled over into historic protests.

Prof Guo Jianwen, a member of the state council’s pandemic prevention team, urged people “don’t go home to visit them” if elderly relatives had not yet been infected, reported The Guardian. “You have all kinds of ways to show you care for them, you don’t necessarily have to bring the virus to their home,” Guo said on Thursday.

China had earlier claimed that this week the peak of infections had passed in several big provinces and cities including Beijing and Shanghai. But there were serious concerns for regional areas where health resources are more limited and older people are more likely to be unvaccinated.

“The situation in rural China is very murky,” reported Guardian citing Chen Xi, an assistant professor specialising in ageing and public health at Yale University. “We have strong reasons to believe rural China will get much worse as the spring festival approaches.”

WHO urges COVID-19 transparency from China

The WHO called on China to be more transparent in sharing data on its explosive COVID-19 outbreak on Wednesday.

The WHO has repeatedly expressed concerns that China's official statistics are not showing the true impact of the current surge in COVID-19 cases. "WHO still believes that deaths are heavily under-reported from China," said the organisation's emergencies director, Michael Ryan during a press conference. He blamed Beijing's narrow definition of what constitutes a COVID-19 death, and also pointed to "the need for doctors in the public health system to be encouraged to report these cases, and not discouraged".

In contrast, Ryan praised the cooperation of authorities in the US, where the new Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.5 is spreading rapidly. He said, "There's been radical transparency on behalf of the United States, in terms of engaging with the WHO regarding the data and the impact of that data."