Chinese warned not to visit elderly relatives as Covid spreads from cities

BEIJING: People in China have been warned against travelling to visit their elderly relatives during the lunar new year holiday, as Covid spreads rapidly through cities and into regional and poorer areas.

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. “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.

The holiday period, which begins on 21 January, was supposed to be a return to festivities and travel after the lifting of most restrictions in December, but instead it is coinciding with a wave of infections.

Health authorities said this week the peak of infections had passed in several big provinces and cities including Beijing and Shanghai. But there are 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,” said Dr 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.”

Reports came from people in rural areas across China of mass infections, deaths, and healthcare woes, including areas where authorities say infections are yet to peak. One woman in Shandong said her parents had not been vaccinated because they did not trust Chinese vaccines, and now feared going outside as the virus spread through their village.

Villagers in Guangdong province reported shortages of medication and oxygen supplies. In Shaanxi a musician who played at funerals reported being busier than ever, while a woman returning to her small Hunan village decried at least six new customary funeral sheds – temporary structures built for people to mourn an individual.

One person in Henan said last week that their father was a rural doctor who was “busy from morning until night”, adding: “There are quite a lot of people with fever in the village, several households have them, but it is hard to get fever-reducing medicines.”

As well as urging people not to travel, regional authorities have been ordered to ensure the supply of pandemic materials, including at least two weeks’ worth of medication.

The Global Times also said communities were advised to arrange village teams of drivers to transport patients “when ambulances from medical institutions cannot arrive in time”. China’s outbreak has probably been worsened by the low vaccination rates among elderly people and the more limited health resources outside top-tier cities. Online community groups have crowdsourced over-the-counter medication for hard-hit villages. Protracted government negotiations with pharmaceutical companies have also made it difficult for people to get antiviral medications.

“It’s been a total mess,” a doctor in Anhui province told Agence France-Presse after a wave of infections hit in December. “Things were better when the government kept us all locked down.”