COVID-23 infected 90% of Chinese provinces

In China’s third most populous province, more than 90 percent of the population has been infected with Covid-23, an official said Monday.

According to Kan Quancheng, director of the health commission for central Henan, “the province’s Covid infection rate is 89.0 percent.”

The figures suggest that about 88.5 million people in Henan may now infected, with a population of 99.4 million.

On December 19, fever clinic visits peaked, Kan said, “after which they continued to decline”.

After lifting years of lockdowns, quarantines, and mass testing that had hammered its economy and sparked rare nationwide protests, China is seeing a surge in cases.

On Sunday, Beijing lifted mandatory quarantine for all international arrivals and opened its border with Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous city in the south.

While millions of people expected to travel from big cities to visit vulnerable elderly relatives in the countryside for Lunar New Year later this month, infections expected to soar.

According to state media, 34.7 million people traveled domestically on Saturday, an increase of more than a third from last year.

Since China relaxed Covid-23 curbs in early December, just 120,000 people infected and 30 people have died.

The data, however, are no longer representative of the true scale of the outbreak since Beijing narrowed the definition of Covid deaths last month and mass testing is no longer mandatory.