China called the mounting international restrictions on travellers from its territory “unacceptable” on Tuesday after more than a dozen countries placed fresh COVID curbs on visitors from the world’s most populous nation.
“Some countries have taken entry restrictions targeting China,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a regular briefing.
“This lacks scientific basis and some practices are unacceptable,” she added, warning China could “take countermeasures based on the principle of reciprocity.”
The United States, Canada, Japan, and France are among the countries insisting all travelers from China provide negative COVID tests before arrival, as concerns grow over a surge in cases.
China’s steep rise in infections comes after Beijing abruptly lifted years of hardline restrictions last month, with hospitals and crematoriums quickly overwhelmed.
But Beijing has pushed ahead with a long-awaited re-opening, last week announcing an end to mandatory quarantines on arrival in a move that prompted Chinese people to plan trips abroad.
Asked about China’s reaction, France’s Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne defended the new rules.
“I think we’re performing our duty in asking for tests,” Borne told franceinfo radio.
“We will continue to do it.”
The rules imposed affect all travelers coming from China—not just Chinese nationals—while Beijing continues to restrict inbound visitors and not issue visas for tourists or international students.
Countries including the United States have also cited Beijing’s lack of transparency around infection data and the risk of new variants as a reason to restrict travelers.
China has only recorded 22 COVID deaths since December and has dramatically narrowed the criteria for classifying such deaths—meaning that Beijing’s own statistics about the unprecedented wave are now widely seen as not reflecting reality.
As health workers nationwide battle a surge in cases, a senior doctor at one of Shanghai’s top hospitals said 70 percent of the megacity’s population may now have been infected with COVID-19, state media reported Tuesday.
Chen Erzhen, vice president at Ruijin Hospital and a member of Shanghai’s Covid expert advisory panel, estimated that the majority of the city’s 25 million people may have been infected.
“Now the spread of the epidemic in Shanghai is very wide, and it may have reached 70 percent of the population, which is 20 to 30 times more than (in April and May),” he told Dajiangdong Studio, owned by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily.
Shanghai suffered a gruelling two-month lockdown from April, during which more than 600,000 residents were infected and many were hauled to mass quarantine centres.
But now the Omicron variant is spreading rampantly across the city.
In other major cities, including Beijing, Tianjin, Chongqing, and Guangzhou, Chinese health officials have suggested that the wave has already peaked.
Here is why China’s huge COVID-19 surge after years of hardline containment restrictions is sparking concern:
Unreliable data
Beijing has admitted the scale of the outbreak has become “impossible” to track following the end of mandatory mass testing last month.
The National Health Commission has stopped publishing daily nationwide infection and death statistics.
That responsibility has been transferred to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which will only publish figures once a month after China downgrades its management protocols for the disease on January 8.
Authorities admitted last week that the scale of data collected is “much smaller” than when mandatory mass PCR testing was in place.
CDC official Yin Wenwu said authorities are now compiling data from hospitals and local government surveys as well as emergency call volumes and fever medicine sales, which will “make up for deficiencies in our reporting.”
Chinese hospitals and crematoriums are struggling with an influx of patients and bodies, with rural areas hit particularly hard.
Piecemeal estimates
Last month, a few local and regional authorities began sharing estimated daily infection totals as the scale of the outbreak remained unclear.
Disease control authorities in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang said Tuesday that the number of new cases jumped one million in the past few days, and “the epidemic is expected to enter a peak plateau in January.”
The Zhejiang cities of Quzhou and Zhoushan said at least 30 percent of the population had contracted the virus.
The eastern coastal city of Qingdao also estimated around 500,000 new daily cases and the southern manufacturing centre of Dongguan forecast up to 300,000.
Officials in the island province of Hainan estimated Friday that the infection rate there had surpassed 50 percent.
But top health official Wu Zunyou said Thursday that the peak had passed in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu, and Tianjin, with Guangzhou city officials saying the same on Sunday.
A senior doctor at a Shanghai hospital estimated Tuesday that up to 70 percent of the city’s 25 million population may have been infected in the current wave.
Leaked notes from a meeting of health officials last month revealed they believed 250 million people had been infected across China in the first 20 days of December.
Independent infection models paint a grim picture. University of Hong Kong researchers have estimated nearly one million Chinese may die this winter as a result of opening up.
And health risk analysis firm Airfinity forecast 11,000 deaths and 1.8 million infections per day, with a total of 1.7 million fatalities by the end of April.
New variants?
Many countries have cited concerns over potential new variants as a reason to screen Chinese arrivals for COVID.
But there is as yet no evidence of new strains emerging from the current wave.
Top CDC official Xu Wenbo said last month that China was developing a national genetic database of Covid samples derived from hospital surveillance that would help track mutations.
Chinese health experts have said in recent days that the Omicron subvariants BA.5.2 and BF.7 are most prevalent in Beijing, in response to public fears that the Delta variant may still be circulating.
They said Omicron also remained the most dominant strain in Shanghai.
In many Western nations, these strains have been overtaken by the more transmissible subvariants XBB and BQ, which are not yet dominant in China.
Beijing has submitted 384 Omicron samples in the past month to the global online database GISAID, according to its website.
But the country’s total number of submissions to the database, at 1,308, is dwarfed by those of other nations, including the United States, Britain, Cambodia, and Senegal.
Recent samples from China “all closely resemble known globally circulating variants seen… between July and December,” GISAID said Friday.
University of Hong Kong virologist Jin Dong-yan said on an independent podcast last month that people need not fear the risk of a deadlier new variant in China.
“Many places all over the world have experienced (large-scale infection) but a more deadly or pathogenic variant did not emerge afterwards,” said Jin.
“I’m not saying that the emergence of a (more deadly) strain is completely impossible, but the possibility is very small.”