Sheng Chun had not visited his parents in their mountain village in southern China for more than three years because China’s “zero Covid” restrictions made travel difficult. Then the country abandoned its stringent pandemic rules, and he decided to take a long-anticipated road trip. With his son and wife, Mr. Sheng, 43, embarked on a […]
Tag: Covid
A Better Covid Winter – The New York Times
Some of the worst days of Covid in the U.S. have come as winters have settled in, and surges led hospitals to overflow and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. A comparable surge has yet to materialize on a similar timeline this winter. By now, hospitalizations in particular would have started to sharply rise. Instead, […]
How Bad Is China’s Covid Outbreak? It’s a Scientific Guessing Game.
As Covid barrels through China, scientists around the world are searching for clues about an outbreak with sprawling consequences — for the health of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, the global economy and the future of the pandemic. But in the absence of credible information from the Chinese government, it is a big scientific […]
Your Thursday Briefing: The U.S. Requires Covid Tests for Travelers From China
U.S. to test travelers from China for Covid As Covid cases rise in China, the U.S. said it would require all travelers from China to show a negative Covid test, as well as those from Hong Kong and Macau. The move came as China prepared to drop its quarantine requirement for incoming travelers on Jan. […]
With ‘Zero Covid,’ China Proved It’s Good at Control. Governance Is Harder.
A widely circulated WeChat article speculated that the shortage of fever medications reflected the government’s lack of preparation for loosening control. And if the government had shown the same political will that it had in carrying out “zero Covid,” the article argued, it could have ensured there was ample supply of such medication. “It doesn’t […]
New Covid Booster Shots Cut Risk of Hospitalization by Half, CDC Reports
Updated booster shots have bolstered Americans’ defenses against serious Covid, reducing the risk of hospitalization by roughly 50 percent compared with certain groups inoculated with the original vaccines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in a pair of studies published on Friday. The research represents the agency’s first look at how the reformulated […]
China’s Looming ‘Tsunami’ of Covid Cases Will Test Its Hospitals
Until recently, China, the world’s most populous nation, was also the world’s last Covid holdout. But in a matter of weeks it will be hit by a wave that a top health official predicts could infect many hundreds of millions of people. This week, Beijing took its biggest step toward living with Covid, all but […]
Key Partner in Global Covid Vaccine Effort Will End Support for Middle-Income Nations
A key partner in Covax, the organization that has led the effort to bring Covid vaccines to poor and middle-income countries, will stop supplying the shots to a huge part of the global population in the year ahead, and provide them only to the lowest-income nations. The board of governors of Gavi, the nonprofit that […]
China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Policy, in Pictures
For a long time during the coronavirus pandemic, China’s aggressive approach to stamping out cases worked. It has kept deaths from Covid-19 much lower than the rest of the world, most notably in comparison with the United States. But in recent months, that approach, called “zero Covid,” seemed increasingly outdated. China’s residents were still subject […]
China Eases ‘Zero Covid’ Restrictions in Victory for Protesters
The Chinese government announced on Wednesday a broad easing of its exceptionally stringent Covid restrictions, an implicit concession to public discontent after mass street protests in more than a dozen cities a week ago challenged Beijing’s authority. The changes are not a complete dismantling of China’s “zero Covid” policy, but still represent a considerable loosening […]