The vaccination rate is very low for the elderly.

Surely a country that is willing to lock down its showcase city could have also found a way to force its elderly citizens to take the vaccine.

What vaccine? My friend in SH said she still can't get Pfizer, which is why she isn't interested in being vaccinated. If they're willing to throw every last tool they have at trying to stop this virus, why don't they throw the best vaccines at it too?

Sinopharm and Sinovac seem to do ok against death from Covid which is the main goal.

Ouch. Considering, as long as they don't have a Schengen Visa, they can't even take another connection form Zürich through another Schengen hub.

I thought China only allowed for pax to take direct flights, though?

I'm really feeling sorry for those stranded in ZRH. At least there is a Non-Schengen transit hotel, albeit a basic one.

If you can choose between some reasonable and zero protection, most people will take the reasonable protection. If your friend wants "the best or nothing", good luck to her. I won't have pity with people with her attitude.

Not sure about getting vaccinated, but my 92-year-old grandmother (who worked for Xinhua Bookstore) says they were withholding her retirement pensions and other social/government benefits if she didn't get tested.

If there are no direct flights from your country you are/were allowed one transfer. For my return, two weeks ago, my flights were London - Helsinki - Shanghai....

"China has recently pivoted to a more targeted approach to dealing with flareups as part of President Xi Jinping's dual goals of seeking to eliminate the virus while minimizing the economic and social impacts of the Covid Zero strategy. But the rapid rise in cases in Shanghai underscores the limitations of such measures in the face of highly transmissible omicron train...

...The financial hub reported about 3,500 infections Sunday, according to a CCTV report, overtaking Jilin as the nation's biggest Covid hot spot."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...s-for-march-26

China is acting unbelievably foolish in response to the Omnicron strain of the virus. In the end the CCP will lose against Omnicron and looking at news reports, it looks like Chinese people will suffer.

On FlightAware page for PVG arrival/departure flight status, there are many reductions in passenger flights

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia...micron-2573281

"Only 19.7 per cent of people aged over 80 in China have received a COVID-19 vaccine booster as of Mar 17, and just 50.7 per cent of that age group have completed their primary vaccinations"

My understanding is that initially, they were not letting older people use the Chinese vaccines, because they were not tested on the older population. This led to older people not wishing to be vaccinated.

China also won’t let you switch vaccine. If you got one of the even more useless non approved ones even over a year ago, you can’t even switch to the slightly less useless sinovac or sinopharm vaccines. And I don’t think they’ve really even pushed for boosters regardless.

I suspect china’s population is about as vulnerable as you could possibly be to covid in 2022.

My wife was reading an article last week (I'm not sure what source, but most of the stuff she reads is in Chinese and I can't read it myself anyway) that said Pfizer's efficacy against Omicron was ~60-70%, while Sinopharm/Sinovac were < 1% (against infection, not severe disease). So if your goal is to actually keep case counts down...

The problem isn't my friend, it's the idiots who won't approve Pfizer/Fosun. I'm actually surprised that the mRNA vaccines have done as well as they have, as I'd have expected inactivated virus vaccines to do better, but data's data.

Well if that's the case, my friend has an even better reason to be a vaccine holdout. She's either going to get Pfizer in SH or she's going to leave the PRC to get Pfizer.

I suspect that it's going to get ugly in Shanghai. Some of these flights would get canceled.

My friend booked April 7 PVG-SFO, and April 11 as backup. Let's see how things go.