Haven't figures decreased since the new ten relaxations started?

Also aren't residents supposed to self report if RAT test positive? In order to get sick leave or to comply with neighbourhood committee regulations.

Sooner or later the death toll should come out. If it doesn't, I call scam.

Scam how?
If the death toll does rise, the numbers can easily be 'manipulated'. Unlike what the 'West' did, where every death was due to Covid-19 if the deceased happened to have Covid-19 at the time of expiry, my guess is here it will be the exact opposite: the official cause of death will be anything other than Covid-19. Mostly.

What about HK?

I don't know of a single person who has ever self-reported a RAT positive. When that happens, de facto SOP is to lay low until you get a negative...then, get a PCR to reset your health code.

narvik Do you know of ANY country/city that reports cases based on extrapolation (instead of confirmed positives only)?

There are valid reasons to do so here in HK

1) you need time off work-sick leave/work from home permission

2) you are planning to travel after recovery and need an alibi to explain why PCR positive on return (residual virus material) (the recovery cert serves as a get out of PCR card for three months).

Of course there are people who don’t need either and prefer to lay low as you say, they’re in breach of the law here but if they don’t plan to be in a situation where they might be caught eg presenting oneself as an inbound traveller

Standard OP here in Beijing right now is: if you test positive through RAT, you stay at home until turning negative again, like you wrote. Hardly anyone (outside of medical workers, etc.) is doing any PCR test any longer, as it's barely needed anymore.
Even hospitals will admit with a RAT.
There is no place even, where a positive RAT is (or could be) recorded, AFAIK. Many are reporting, when they do call a positive RAT test in, they are told to simply stay home, and isolate, and only leave again, once negative. A PCR is not demanded anymore.

I am only trying to convey that the cases of people positive with Covid-19 here in Beijing (either current or past) is astronomical. In the millions by now, is my best guess.

Apologies for the slow reply - I spiked a 39.5C fever on Saturday night and am still limiting my time at the computer while I rest.

I think though that you may have missed my point - which is that the scale of the difference in numbers between those "reported" and in real-life is too big to just get by as calling "under-reporting". And also that phrase actually suggests the authorities know the true figure and are hiding it, when it is clear on the ground here in Beijing that they do not.

I am one of the very few foreigners in my compound, which is basically off-campus housing for a university in Beijing. After talking with my wife on Sunday morning we figured we should call the local committee to let them know I had a high fever. Their response was basically "Er okay. Join the club - stay at home and drink plenty of fluids". That was it. They didn't want to know.

Re: employees I can only speak for the company my wife works for (an investment law company) - everyone is working at home anyway, and certainly no-one needs to produce a RAT result (even they are able to get one*) in order to offload some casework for a few days.

*My wife works as a lawyer for several pharmaceutical companies, and reading between the lines at the start of last week she already reached out to a few of them to try and get some, but even with her contacts still no dice.

I can understand how unbelievable this sounds - I can also hardly believe how much things have changed in just a few days here in Beijing. What is clear is that there has been also a no-so-subtle shift in the messaging to something along the lines of (I can't recall the exact Chinese phrase) "Everyone is the first person responsible for their health", which is the first step of washing their hands from the fatalities among the elderly non-fully-vaccinated when they come.

In terms of numbers based on anecdotal evidence it does seem like this has already affected 10% of the population - though I do find that hard to believe, as with a typical doubling time of 3 days for omicron, and a peak burnout at around 60% of the local population (based on previous waves outside China), that would put the peak here in less than 2 weeks. Who knows though?

Hope you get better soon GinFizz!
每个人是自己健康第一责任人

China is an expert at shooting itself in the foot.
Anyways I’m happy to share in your prediction for early 2023 and will be a visa applying guinea pig.

Following up on my post from a month ago, I predict existing 10-year visas will be reactivated within 60 days. Perhaps within 30 days if the Jan. 9 rumors turn out to be true.

So glad I never tried to get a pandemic visa (which would have canceled my 10-year visa).

I am not too sure about that one. Not saying it's impossible, but I reckon they could just draw the line and say: "everyone re-apply again". At least for tourist visas.
Residence Permits are quite a bit more involved to obtain, so it wouldn't be too far fetched that they would make a distinction between those and tourist visas.

You're a bit too optimistic IMHO. Border will be easier to cross but they won't open up to tourists so soon. Biz visas will be prioritized and 10 year visas will need to be reapplied for is my guess. I put tourist visas being easily granted as a June/July thing. I don't think they want a bunch of random tourists roaming around as COVID rips through their population this winter.

It's already bad.

Given the high R0 I think it will burn through pretty fast and the healthcare system is going to be swamped worse than Wuhan.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/...re-2022-12-12/

Yeah, the word is that China will go down to 2+3 soon, then 0+3 in early January 2023.
Hong Kong just relaxed restrictions too, and is supposedly doing 0+0 from tomorrow (with proof of a negative test).

Both Japan and South Korea have reactivated their suspended visas. China simply copied their suspensions at the start.

Japan and Korea didn't reduce inbound flights by 95%. I doubt China will be keen on opening the floodgates to tourists until after 40-50% are reinstated, so I wouldn't be surprised to see tourist visas remain crappy for quite a while.

Given the speed of the opening within China, I doubt they're going to hold the borders for too long. The border restrictions were never important politically within China.

Here we go. Need to see the corresponding butcher's bill:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...p-backup-plans

OK. There may be a possibility they need to recalibrate the reporting from testing station PCR to self-reporting RAT. But this can't be used to explain the low figures for very long.

Also you'd have other sources - e.g. tests taken in hospitals and clinics.

Border restrictions were indeed very important politically in China. Their whole message was that the rest of the world was failing at Covid but thanks to the glorious leadership of Chairman Xi and the party, China is safe from the deadly Covid virus. Foreigners living in China often felt the impact of this as well with people refused entry to places and things like people getting up and moving when a foreigner sat down next to them on the subway.

Of course China can’t use any of this propaganda anymore now that they’ve let it rip at China speed, but I imagine the full lifting of border restrictions will still take some time.

I’d also like to thank the party personally for locking me down in Shanghai for a few months for no reason. Nothing has changed with Covid from April until now, there was no reason not to let it rip then other than just implementing a few months of human suffering just because they could. Maybe they decided to wait until mid winter instead of spring/summer to let it rip to really increase the impact of Covid.

I suppose they could switch to using something like hospitalizations as their baseline metric (like many US states). Self reporting of positives isn't going to happen at scale.

I am sort of hoping that I have to apply for a new 10 year visa. I just got a new passport, but my original visa is good until late 2025. That would mean carrying 2 passports for a couple of years. If I can get a new visa in my new passport the overlap will be a few months and not until 10 years down the road (by which time I will likely be retired anyway!).

I normally used to travel to China in April and October around the time of the Canton Fair. My (uneducated) guess is April of 2023 is still out; but October is very possible. We will see.

That's sort of what I'm thinking when it comes to a potentially new visa. I want to time any new Chinese visa with the renewal of my passport.

I'm veering slightly off topic here I know but your last sentence did make me wonder: we read a lot about the increasing economic problems China will face from its aging population. If the bosses really want to address this with a crude sledgehammer then letting Covid rip in the cold winter could be a partial answer so the timing is perfect. A few strategic power cuts could complete the job nicely.

Back on topic, I also don't think they're going to open the border any time soon to anything that resembles pre-Covid two-way travel. They reportedly removed close-up shots of maskless football supporters from the Qatar World Cup TV broadcasts so citizens couldn't witness Covid freedom in the rest of the world. I do not think they will allow citizens pre-Covid levels of international travel any time soon because there's the real risk travellers will learn the rest of the world has been normal for ages and bring that knowledge back to the motherland risking further social unrest.

China won't open up to international travel EVER, or January 9th, 2023; whichever comes first. :D

Everything back to normal on January 9th then. Happy days. I'll hold you to that :D.

Here's an interesting bit of info:

This is allegedly a new sign at Shenzhen North Railway Station, listing various cancelled trains to Hong Kong West Kowloon Station.

The fact that the trains to Hong Kong are cancelled isn't new; it's been that way for 3 years.

The new part, is that the notice says these trains are cancelled through December 24 or December 25. An optimistic interpretation, therefore, is that the trains to Hong Kong will restart on December 25 or 26.

Anyways, take this with a gigantic grain of salt, but if it does happen, you heard it here first!


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...34601c4c00.jpg

Futian port being lit up too, HK Government told the public to not speculate on the meaning.

When they reduced quarantine from 14+7 to 7+3 at the height of Zero-Covid there was not a single peep out of the population. I doubt there is any political resistance for going down to 0.

Agreed. Still, the sudden policy shift is truly astounding. Who knows, maybe it's because Xi was actually patient zero for the Beijing outbreak, after he got it from Trudeau while they were squabbling in Bali!

I've seen numerous instances of policies starting/stopping pretty much immediately. Before this month's moves, the end of our (SH) lockdown at midnight on June 1 is the next most recent that comes to mind. While isolated lockdowns continued after that, most of the municipality-wide rules simply disappeared and public transit went from ~5% to ~99% overnight.

Another data point suggesting that the HK/mainland border might open soon

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/...-shift-towards

Hong Kong to send ‘thousands of officers’ to checkpoints along mainland Chinese border ahead of shift towards freer travel

• Government sources say relevant departments preparing to test all customs checkpoint clearance systems, including those at high-speed rail terminus
• Beijing eager to fully reopen border from early next month to revive both Hong Kong and mainland economies, source with knowledge on matter says

Thousands of customs, immigration and police officers will be sent to land checkpoints to manage predicted surge in traffic as the border between Hong Kong and mainland China is expected to fully reopen next month, the Post has learned.

A government source on Thursday said the relevant departments were preparing to test all customs checkpoint clearance systems at the city’s high-speed rail that extends into Guangdong province and along other sections of the border as authorities needed weeks to prepare for the relaxed rules.

Another insider said the city’s rail operator was gearing up to resume the service by performing frequent drills.

“Despite that most of the border checkpoints have been closed, their operations have remained normal during the past three years with staff working there to provide regular security, checks and maintenance,” the insider said.

“For the high-speed rail and other cross-border rail services, there has been a minimum rail service to transport the mainland staff to and from the mainland. To reopen its services, the MTR Corporation only needs to redeploy its staff again for the rail borders.”

Most of Hong Kong’s border checkpoints have been closed since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, including those at Lok Ma Chau, Heung Yuen Wai and the West Kowloon high-speed rail terminus.

Under the current restrictions, travellers can enter the mainland from Hong Kong using the city’s airport, as well as the control points at Shenzhen Bay and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge.

Sources previously told the Post that the city was set to fully reopen its borders with the mainland and resume the high-speed train service to Guangdong from early next month.

The expected reopening follows the government’s decision to roll back anti-epidemic restrictions, such as easing entry rules for arrivals and no longer relying on the “Leave Home Safe” risk-exposure app, despite a significant increase recently in Hong Kong’s virus caseloads.

Thursday marked the highest number of daily cases since March 18, with health officials reporting 17,080 infections, 831 of which were imported, and 19 additional deaths.

The city’s overall tally stands at 2,307,397 cases and 11,075 related fatalities.

Mainland 2,229 cases yesterday
https://www.i-cable.com/%e6%96%b0%e8...B%98%E5%B3%B0/
https://news.now.com/home/internatio...?newsId=501161

HK has 15K cases today

We must be using a different counting system

Didn't mainland officially stop counting asymptomatic cases earlier this week?

Yes, not sure why this is still discussed as some kind of big revelation.
The non-counting is at official policy level at the moment, and has little "Ah, gotcha!" effect at this point.
Beijing is likely over 10 million cases that have it or just had it. It's predicted to go into the hundreds of millions across all of China soon.

Just to be clear, they are not counting most symptomatic cases either.

Added; of much graver concern ought to be the apparent complete lack of counting deaths.

Family reports from Beijing are basically saying that a) it's amazing how everything suddenly disappeared with no comment and b) everyone is now getting COVID to the surprise of also nobody c) everyone is simultaneously relieved and worried

Even if you told me 2,000 hospitalisation of old people due to Covid yesterday, that figure seems to be a little lowball given let it rip.

Another bad Soviet joke - we pretend Covid doesn't exist and don't impose restrictions on you/your family/your city if you too pretend it doesn't exist?

Or is it like homosexuality in the US military in the Clinton era? Don't ask, don't tell?

That's pretty much it, yes.

The flight out of PVG was bizarre:
1) They confiscate hand sanitizer at the security check probably becuse the alcohol based ones are flammable?
2) The flight was 100% masked (maybe not cockpit, don't know).
Although it's not required of course, the FAs seemed relieved and were wearing masks also. There was no announcement about masks.

Maybe it’s fine, provided hospitals don’t get overwhelmed.

The best case scenario is everyone gets flu equivalent for a week over the next three months.

But nowhere overseas where we had an off/on scenario: Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore (?) were hospitals not overwhelmed during the transition.