Tag: COVID-19 Pandemic

Hong Kong said Thursday it will soon no longer require people infected with COVID-19 to quarantine. Chief Executive John Lee told lawmakers the move is “one of the most important steps towards normalcy.” The new policy will begin January 30, and follows a similar move by mainland China earlier this month. People in Hong Kong will still be required to wear masks unless exercising. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. VOA

Washington —  Satellite images of lines of cars and jammed parking lots at crematoriums far from Beijing suggest a much higher death toll than the official count of some 60,000 people that Beijing has acknowledged since it relaxed its “zero-COVID” policy in December. The photos obtained by VOA Korean through the satellite imagery company Planet Labs showed long queues of vehicles in front of some funeral homes in late December. Judging from image databases released by the company and Google Earth Pro, the funeral homes in Guangzhou’s Panyu District 2,161…

Washington —  Taixing, a city of nearly 1 million people in Jiangsu Province, is richly red in Chinese Communist Party history, landmarks and revolutionary traditions. On Wenchang West Road, there’s a noteworthy new marker: the crematorium attached to the Taixing Funeral Parlor. According to local residents, there are at least seven furnaces transforming hundreds of individually labeled corpses into ashes each day. So busy is the Taixing Funeral Parlor that the body of Jun Cheng’s uncle, believed to be about 80 years old when he died December 29, remained at…

Beijing —  Passengers laden with luggage flocked to rail stations and airports in China’s megacities on Monday, heading to their hometowns for Lunar New Year holidays that health experts fear could intensify a raging COVID-19 outbreak in areas less-equipped to handle it. After three years of strict anti-virus controls, China abruptly abandoned its “zero COVID” policy in early December, letting the virus run freely through its 1.4 billion population. Authorities said on Saturday nearly 60,000 people with COVID had died in hospitals between December 8 and January 12, a huge…

HONG KONG/BEIJING —  China resumed on Sunday high-speed rail services between Hong Kong and the mainland for the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it dismantles travel curbs after Beijing scrapped quarantine for arrivals a week earlier. The re-opening comes amidst a massive wave of infections nationwide and a day after authorities said nearly 60,000 people with COVID had died in hospital, following last month’s abrupt U-turn on “zero-COVID” policy in the wake of historic protests. Despite the infections, some passengers voiced excitement and relief about…

BEIJING —  China reported Saturday nearly 60,000 deaths in people who had COVID-19 since early December following complaints it was failing to release data, and said the “emergency peak” of its latest surge appears to have passed. The toll included 5,503 deaths due to respiratory failure caused by COVID-19 and 54,435 fatalities from other ailments combined with COVID-19 since Dec. 8, the National Health Commission announced. It said those “deaths related to COVID” occurred in hospitals, which left open the possibility more people also might have died at home. The…

As China grapples with a massive surge of coronavirus infections, a new study by a Chinese university estimates the virus has infected some 900 million people in the country to date. China has stopped publishing daily COVID statistics following the end of its zero-COVID policy. The government claims the total number of dead since the beginning of the pandemic is around 5,200, but many health experts consider that a vast undercount. The Peking University study says roughly 64% of all people in China are estimated to have been infected, and…