BEIJING – People in China are fretting over spreading Covid-19 to their elderly relatives as they return to their home towns for the holidays, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) warns could inflame a raging outbreak.

Chinese New Year, which officially starts on Jan 21, comes after China in December abandoned a strict anti-virus regime of mass lockdowns that prompted widespread frustration, which boiled over into historic protests.

That abrupt U-turn unleashed Covid-19 on a population of 1.4 billion that had been shielded from the coronavirus since it first erupted in China’s Wuhan city in 2019.

The outbreak is now overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums as it rips through the population, with many seniors still not fully vaccinated.

With scant official data from China, the WHO said on Wednesday that it will be challenging to manage the virus over a holiday period considered the world’s largest annual human migration.

Other warnings from top Chinese health experts for people not to visit their elderly relatives during the holidays shot to being the most-read item on China’s Twitter-like Weibo on Thursday.

“This is a very pertinent suggestion: Return to the home town… or put the health of the elderly first,” wrote one user.

Another said she would instead just leave gifts on her grandmother’s doorstep.

“This is almost the New Year, and I’m afraid that she will be lonely,” the user wrote.

Still not there yet

The WHO and foreign governments have criticised China for not being forthright about the scale and severity of its outbreak, which has led several countries to impose restrictions on Chinese travellers.

China has been reporting five or fewer deaths a day over the past month, numbers that are inconsistent with the long queues seen at funeral homes.

Dr Liang Wannian, head of a Covid-19 expert panel under the national health authority, told reporters that deaths can be accurately counted only after the pandemic is over.

Although international health experts have predicted at least one million Covid-related deaths in 2023, China has reported just more than 5,000 since the pandemic began, a fraction of what other countries have reported as they removed restrictions.

Looking beyond the death toll, investors are betting that China’s reopening will reinvigorate a US$17 trillion (S$23 trillion) economy suffering its lowest growth in nearly half a century.

That has lifted its currency and Asian stocks to multi-month highs in recent trading sessions.

Despite Beijing’s lifting of travel curbs, outbound flight bookings from China were at only 15 per cent of pre-pandemic levels in the week after the country announced it would reopen its borders, travel data firm ForwardKeys said on Thursday.

Low airline capacity, high airfares, new pre-flight Covid-19 testing requirements by many countries and a backlog of passport and visa applications pose challenges as the industry looks to recovery, said ForwardKeys vice-president Olivier Ponti. REUTERS