China's wave of Covid is coming to an end, health officials have claimed, there had been no sign of a new surge from the lunar new year holiday period, despite a big increase in travel compared to last year.
The government figures released on Tuesday showed a big rise in tourism and hospitality activity compared to the same time last year. Factory activity rebounded for the first time in four months, an early sign of economic return after the country reported its slowest growth in half a century during strict Covid controls.
After lifting zero-Covid restrictions in early December, China was swamped by a wave of Covid cases. The data on admissions to hospitals and fever clinics in recent weeks showed an apparent peak in infections around early January.
The mass travel of hundreds of millions of people for the lunar new year could spread infections, according to concerns.
On Tuesday, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention CDC claimed that there had not been an obvious rebound in Covid cases. This time, no new variant has been discovered, and the country's current wave is coming to an end. In the first 22 days of the year's travel period, travel in the ministry of transport was 75.8% higher than in 2022, although it was still only half the number of trips made during the last pre-pandemic lunar new year in 2019.
According to Trivium, travel would increase by 99.5% year-on-year over the whole 40 days, and reach 70.3% of pre-pandemic levels.
Other economic figures were mixed, as China grapples with the effects of zero-Covid on its economy. The tourism and hospitality sectors had the most positive results, reaching almost 81% of pre-pandemic levels.
Domestic tourism trips rose to 88.6% of the level of 2019, but revenue from consumption-related industries grew by just 12.2% in the first week of the holiday period.
The official manufacturing purchasing managers index PMI stood at 50.1, compared with a reading of 47.0 in December, the National Bureau of Statistics NBS said on Tuesday. The growth outlook for China was sharply revised by the IMF for 2023, to 5.2% from 4.4% in October, after zero-Covid lockdown policies in 2022 slashed the country's growth rate to 3.0%.
The lunar new year period, which has been about 40 days, has been the largest amount of human migration in the world, with hundreds of millions of people traveling through China and the region, including domestic migrant workers returning to their home villages and towns to reunite with family. It's the only chance that many people can go home each year, but the pandemic prevented many from doing so in recent years.
Even after restrictions were lifted this year, people were urged to reconsider visiting elderly relatives of those relatives who had not yet been infected.
The true extent of deaths and infections outside cities has not been clear. The official death figure based on cases in hospitals ranges from about 80,000 to more than a million according to global health experts.