People wearing masks line up at the Shanghai railway station before the May Day holiday. (April 30, 2021)
The start of China’s May Day holiday is expected to see the number of people traveling out of the country surpass the highest point before the outbreak of the Communist virus. This will on the one hand provide a new growth engine for China’s economic growth, but on the other hand, the gathering of large crowds provides an opportunity for the spread of the mutated virus.
During the Chinese New Year, as the outbreak was found to have rebounded in many parts of the country, governments across China reintroduced stringent prevention and control measures and banned people from traveling. Now that the outbreak appears to be under control, travel restrictions have been lifted and long-suppressed travel demand has been released at once, bringing back the old bustle of traffic and tourist attractions across China.
The number of travelers during the May Day Golden Week could reach an unprecedented 200 million, surpassing the 195 million travelers in 2019 before the outbreak, according to Chinese travel service website Ctrip. Railroad traffic in the Yangtze River Delta was expected to exceed 3 million passengers on Friday, with 580,000 passengers sent from Shanghai station.
By contrast, the rest of the world, most of which is still struggling to contain the outbreak, is not at all open to domestic or international travel.
Nie Wen, an economic analyst at Shanghai-based Warburg Trust, believes that the number of travelers during May Day is likely to be more than 200 million. In addition to travel, many people who have not been able to go out to visit friends and relatives because of the epidemic will make up for it this time, and the number of travelers could reach 300 million, close to the entire population of the United States.
Since China has not yet opened up to international travel, May Day travel is basically limited to the country. Tourists will not only be in the developed eastern regions, but there will also be many who are willing to go farther, to the less economically developed Midwest, giving a long-overdue boost to the tourism industry there.
Ctrip said, “This May Day, there will be more enthusiasm for long-distance cross-province travel.”
Some tour guides said that some tourists took more leave, extending their five-day vacation to nine days, with the aim of traveling to remote areas. This was probably done to make up for the lack of travel caused by not being able to travel abroad.
Before the outbreak, the most popular neighboring countries for Chinese tourists were Thailand, Japan, Singapore, etc.
India, a large country in South Asia, has recently deteriorated dramatically, with the number of daily infections and deaths climbing sharply, and the severity of the epidemic shocking the world. It is generally believed that there are three factors causing the worsening of the epidemic in India. First, India is loosely managed and unable to take severe epidemic prevention measures. Second, the Indian public overestimated the lethality of the CCP virus. Third, the virus in India has mutated and become more infectious and lethal.
There is already evidence that this mutated virus has been seen in some parts of China, and on April 28, the city of Chongqing reported a case of overseas importation. This patient had previous experience working in India.
Chinese epidemiologist Wu Zunyou told a news conference on April 29 on the joint prevention and control mechanism of the Chinese State Council that the Indian outbreak has once again sounded the alarm, showing that the prevention and control of the epidemic is difficult, complex, recurrent and long-term.
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