China has suspended or closed the social media accounts of more than 1,000 critics of the government’s policies on the COVID-19 outbreak, as the country moves to open up further.
Popular social media platform Sina Weibo said it addressed 12,854 violations, including attacks on experts, academics and medical workers, and issued temporary or permanent bans on 1,120 accounts.
The ruling Communist Party had relied heavily on the medical community to justify its harsh lockdowns, quarantine measures and mass testing, all of which it abruptly abandoned last month, leading to an increase in new cases who stretched medical resources to their limits. The party allows no direct criticism and imposes strict limits on freedom of expression.
The company “will continue to intensify investigations and clean up all kinds of illegal content, and create a harmonious and friendly community environment for the majority of users,” Sina Weibo said in a statement dated Thursday.
Critics have largely focused on unlimited travel restrictions that have seen people confined to their homes for weeks, sometimes without adequate food or medical care. Anger was also expressed over the requirement that anyone who potentially tested positive or had been in contact with such a person be confined for observation in a field hospital, where overcrowding, poor food and hygiene were routine. quoted.
The social and economic costs ultimately prompted rare street protests in Beijing and other cities, possibly influencing the party’s decision to quickly ease the toughest measures.
China now faces rising cases and hospitalizations in major cities and braces for further spread in less developed areas with the start of the Lunar New Year travel rush, should start in the next few days. While international flights are still reduced, authorities say they expect domestic train and air journeys to double from the same period last year, bringing overall numbers back to those of the period. 2019 holidays before the pandemic hit.
The Department for Transport on Friday called on travelers to reduce travel and gatherings, especially if they involve the elderly, pregnant women, small children and people with underlying illnesses.
People using public transport are also advised to wear masks and pay close attention to their health and personal hygiene, Vice Minister Xu Chengguang told reporters at a press briefing.
Nevertheless, China is moving forward with a plan to end mandatory quarantines for people arriving from overseas from Sunday.
Beijing also plans to drop the requirement for students in city schools to have a negative COVID-19 test to enter campus when classes resume on February 2. 13 after the holidays. While schools will be allowed to move classes online in the event of further outbreaks, they must resume in-person instruction as soon as possible, the city’s education office said in a statement Friday.
However, the end of mass testing, a very limited amount of basic data such as the number of deaths, infections and serious cases, and the potential emergence of new variants have prompted governments elsewhere to virus testing requirements institute for travelers from China.
The World Health Organization has also expressed concern about the lack of data from China, while the United States requires a negative test result for travelers from China within 48 hours of departure.
Chinese health authorities publish a daily count of new cases, severe cases and deaths, but these figures only include officially confirmed cases and use a very narrow definition of COVID-related deaths.
Authorities say that since the government ended mandatory testing and allowed people with mild symptoms to test themselves and recover at home, it can no longer provide a full picture of the state of the latest epidemic.
On Sunday, the National Health Commission reported 10,681 new national cases, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 482,057. Three new deaths were also reported in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 5 267.
The figures are just a fraction of those announced by the United States, which has put its death toll at more than one million among some 101 million cases.
But they are also much smaller than the estimates published by some local governments. Zhejiang, a province on the east coast, said on Tuesday it was seeing around 1 million new cases a day.
China has said testing requirements imposed by foreign governments – most recently Germany and Sweden – are not based on science and threatened unspecified countermeasures. Its spokespersons said the situation was under control and dismissed accusations of unpreparedness to reopen.
If a variant appears during an epidemic, it is detected by genetic sequencing of the virus.
Since the start of the pandemic, China has shared 4,144 sequences with GISAID, a global coronavirus data platform. This represents just 0.04% of its number of reported cases – a rate more than 100 times lower than that of the United States and almost four times lower than that of neighboring Mongolia.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong also plans to reopen some of its border crossing points with mainland China on Sunday and allow tens of thousands of people to cross each day without being quarantined.
The semi-autonomous city in southern China has been hit hard by the virus and its land and sea border checkpoints with the mainland have been largely closed for nearly three years. Despite the risk, the reopening is expected to provide a much-needed boost to Hong Kong’s tourism and retail sectors.
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