China says more than 1.3 million people have applied for passports after reopening borders

Since China reopened its borders last Sunday after keeping them closed for three years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 1.35 million people have applied for passports and visas in the country. There are, on average, 270,000 orders per day, and the trend is for growth.

“The number of requests for entry and exit documents will continue to increase steadily in the near future,” said Liu Haitao, director of the Department of Border Inspection and Management of China on Friday, after releasing the balance of the latest five days.

The reopening takes place at a time of high cases of coronavirus in the country and on the eve of one of the main holidays of the Asian giant. The Chinese New Year is traditionally accompanied by a boom in the number of trips and, after three years under the restrictions of the zero Covid policy, the expectation is that 2023 will register even more significant figures.

This is the case of Chu Wenhong, 54, interviewed by the Reuters news agency. A laboratory worker, she has lived in Singapore since 1994 and, at least once a year, would return to Shanghai to visit her family. The last visit was in November 2019, a month before Chinese authorities identified the first Covid outbreak in Wuhan.

Since then, it has not been able to maintain the tradition due to restrictions. Travel was not prohibited, but involved extra expenses with quarantines that could reach three weeks in hotel rooms. Even for those who agreed to face the isolation period, flights were often canceled or cost much more than usual due to the drastic reduction in supply.

“I can finally go back. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” said Chu, who will be reunited with his 83-year-old father and 78-year-old mother. “I haven’t seen them in three years, and they both got Covid. , I feel pretty lucky because it wasn’t serious, but their health isn’t very good. So I want to go home and see them as soon as possible.”

Despite being permitted, Chu’s trip, in practice, contradicts an orientation. Guo Jianwen, member of the Pandemic Prevention Council in China, asked on Thursday (12) that the Chinese avoid visiting elderly family members, precisely because of the risk of contamination by Covid for the most vulnerable groups. “You have many ways of showing that you care about them. You don’t necessarily have to bring the virus into your home,” he said.

Since abolishing Covid zero, the Xi Jinping regime has been betting on a set of measures that, according to the authorities, seek to optimize the response to the pandemic. In addition to reinforcing vaccination campaigns, especially among the elderly, a group in which there is a greater immunization gap, the country has accelerated the production of drugs used in the treatment of the disease.

According to the Global Times, a newspaper aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese pharmaceutical companies have advanced in negotiations with American ones, so that Sinopharm, for example, would already make drugs like molnupiravir available on the domestic market this Friday. This is a preparation “preparing to protect high-risk groups, given the possible epidemic waves during the upcoming Lunar New Year festival”, says the publication.

The biggest concern is with rural regions in the interior of China, traditionally with less hospital infrastructure and lower vaccination rates – and where millions of Chinese from the big cities should go during the holiday. For Zeng Guang, former chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the anti-Covid strategy for rural areas is good, but there are still doubts about the effectiveness of its implementation.

The expert says that large cities like Beijing and Chongqing have already reached their peaks of infection, but predicts that, across the country, the number of cases should remain high for two to three months, due to the cyclical nature of contamination.