The president of China, Xi Jinping, spoke this Saturday of a “light of hope” for the country, acknowledging that it is going through a “difficult moment” with new cases of Covid-19 after the lifting of sanitary restrictions.
Three years after the first cases of coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, in the center of the country, China decided to end its radical “Covid zero” policy without warning on December 7.
In less than a month, Chinese hospitals are overcrowded, crematoriums are overflowing and pharmacies are beginning to run out of fever medicine, the French news agency France Press (AFP) reports.
“Epidemic prevention and control have entered a new phase. We are still in a difficult time,” but “the light of hope is ahead,” Xi Jinping said in a televised New Year’s speech quoted by AFP.
It is the second time this week that the Chinese president has ruled on the epidemic, after defending on Monday that the measures applied are aimed at “effectively protecting people’s lives.”
According to the latest official statistics released today, there are more than 7,000 new positive cases and one death linked to covid, in a population of 1.4 billion inhabitants.
The AAF writes this Saturday that “these figures are greatly underestimated and appear to be totally out of step with the reality on the ground.”
The authorities have decided that within a week, on January 8, the mandatory quarantines for those arriving in China will end and the Chinese will be able to travel abroad again.
However, several countries -such as France, Italy, the United States or Japan- have already announced that negative tests will be required of passengers coming from China.
For the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the precautionary measures that various countries are taking are “understandable” taking into account the lack of information provided by Beijing.
Beijing, on the other hand, argues that the statistics it has released since the start of the epidemic have always been transparent.
Source: TSF
