3 billion journeys: Free-flowing travel for Lunar New Year begins, as fears grow for China’s next COVID surge

Hongshen Zhu’s grandmothers live alone in rural Anhui province in eastern China. One of them contracted COVID-19 last month and kept her illness secret from the rest of the family.

“Luckily, her fever subsided and she recovered on her own,” Zhu said. “It is worrisome to be abroad and see a lot of my relatives and friends get infected and I can just hope for the best.”

Zhu’s other grandmother, as far as his family can tell, has yet to be infected.

Many hospitals across the country were already overwhelmed following the abrupt lifting of “zero-COVID” controls in early December, following rare mass protests related to the restrictions. Now, Chinese authorities are racing to equip rural medical facilities with medical supplies and essential goods ahead of the Lunar New Year Spring Festival.

Known as chunyun, which means “spring movement,” the domestic travel many millions of Chinese people take to reunite with families for the Spring Festival holiday is the world’s largest annual human migration event. It spans 40 days around the first day of the lunar new year, which falls on Jan. 22 this year.

Younger and middle-aged Chinese from rural areas tend to relocate to cities for work or education, explained Zhu, who is a postdoctoral fellow of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. This leaves particularly vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, in the countryside.

After the sudden end of China’s zero-COVID policy, which employed strict quarantine controls and mass lockdowns to keep cases from spreading, the virus has ripped through the country. Official death counts remain low, but a leaked memo from Chinese health officials estimated there were at least 250 million COVID-19 infections in December. It is unclear how many cases are present in cities compared to rural areas, since authorities have only released province-wide estimates.

Last month, Airfinity, a U.K.-based life science and analytics firm, forecast 11,000 deaths and 1.8 million infections in China per day, with a total of 1.7 million fatalities by the end of April.

But that number didn’t account for the mass travel that is happening this month for the Lunar New Year festival, which will likely bring a surge of cases to vulnerable populations in under-resourced rural areas, experts say.

On Jan. 8, China also ended its requirement for inbound international travellers to quarantine, meaning that foreign travellers as well as Chinese citizens overseas are now able to immediately resume normal activities upon arrival.

In 2019, before the first coronavirus cases appeared in Wuhan later that year, people in China took 2.99 billion trips over the chunyun period, with the majority taking place in crowded trains, according to government figures. In addition to the main trips home, it is customary for families to take shorter trips to visit the homes of friends and relatives to offer gifts and greetings.

“Many people in Chinese cities haven’t gone home to visit their families in the last three years, either because they’ve been in a government-mandated lockdown or because they haven’t dared to,” said Viola Rothschild, a PhD candidate in political science at Duke University, who has been researching COVID-19’s impact on state-society relations in China.

“Now that lockdowns have lifted, people are understandably very eager to reunite with their families back in their hometowns for the biggest holiday of the year.”

Even though rural townships and villages are much less densely populated than cities, their health-care systems are also much less developed and lack resources in terms of staff, facilities, supplies and medicine to handle a COVID-19 surge, Rothschild said.

“So now we’re seeing this 11th-hour rush where rural health providers are scrambling to procure equipment, to hire staff, to increase capacity in anticipation of this Lunar New Year wave.”

Dr. David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said the upcoming migration is likely to bring the virus to areas in China with relatively fewer cases.

“If you have people from high-prevalence areas move to low-prevalence areas, that will have the effect of making epidemics in the low-prevalence areas take off more rapidly.”

However, a spike in rural areas over the next month may not make a difference in China’s overall COVID-19 case count over a longer period, Fisman said.

“Massive internal migration speeds things up, but isn’t going to change the long-term situation,” he said. “China seems to be locked in to let COVID rip at this point.”

China’s poorest, including migrant workers who work in cities, already bore the brunt of COVID-19 infections and health problems. During the country’s notoriously strict lockdowns, where there were reports of food shortages leading to mass starvation, it was migrant workers who were still delivering food and packages. Because many were not formally employed, they lacked health insurance and faced bureaucratic hurdles to access health care.

To prevent the worst outcomes now that lockdowns are a thing of the past, Chinese officials say they will accelerate the production of medicines, allocate more equipment to rural areas and ensure public access to test kits and fever medication.

Vaccine hesitancy is highest among the country’s elderly, which some researchers attribute in part to a series of non-COVID-related vaccine safety scandals in the past. Among adults over 80, only 40 per cent have had three COVID shots, according to China’s National Health Commission.

As for Zhu, he sees a silver lining when it comes to caring for COVID-19 patients during the Spring Festival period.

“So many elderly in rural areas live by themselves because their children are in cities seeking salaries… and many cities have gone past a peak of COVID-19 cases. Elderly in rural areas, meanwhile, have a perception that it is too expensive to seek treatment at hospitals.

“At least this way, their children will be home to take care of them if they get sick.”

Joanna Chiu is a B.C.-based staff reporter for the Star. She covers global and national affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @joannachiu

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