“Some countries have taken entry restrictions targeting China,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a regular briefing.
Countries including the United States have also cited Beijing’s lack of transparency around infection data and the risk of new variants as a reason to restrict travelers. “Now the spread of the epidemic in Shanghai is very wide, and it may have reached 70 percent of the population, which is 20 to 30 times more than ,” he told Dajiangdong Studio, owned by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily.
That responsibility has been transferred to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention , which will only publish figures once a month after China downgrades its management protocols for the disease on January 8. Disease control authorities in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang said Tuesday that the number of new cases jumped one million in the past few days, and “the epidemic is expected to enter a peak plateau in January.”
But top health official Wu Zunyou said Thursday that the peak had passed in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu, and Tianjin, with Guangzhou city officials saying the same on Sunday. And health risk analysis firm Airfinity forecast 11,000 deaths and 1.8 million infections per day, with a total of 1.7 million fatalities by the end of April.Many countries have cited concerns over potential new variants as a reason to screen Chinese arrivals for COVID.Top CDC official Xu Wenbo said last month that China was developing a national genetic database of Covid samples derived from hospital surveillance that would help track mutations.