Day: December 26, 2022

China’s National Health Commission has announced it will no longer be publishing daily COVID-19 infection figures, as the virus rips through the population with the abandonment of rolling lockdowns, mass tracking of citizens and compulsory testing.

“As of today, we will no longer be releasing daily statistics on the pandemic, with any data released by the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevent for the purposes of reference and research,” the health ministry said on its official website.

The announcement came as China said Monday that beginning on Jan. 8, 2023 it will put an end to a mandatory quarantine on arrival for overseas travelers that had been in place since March 2020.

It also followed a leaked ministerial document dated Dec. 20 — which analysts said was likely the result of computer modeling in the absence of widespread testing — said around 250 million people may now be infected with COVID-19 following the lifting of control measures. 

Officials had already warned that the development of the current outbreak had become “impossible to track” in the absence of mass testing.

High-profile pro-government commentator Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, said the figures released in recent days had been “seriously distorted,” and believed by no-one.

The announcement came amid anecdotal evidence of skyrocketing death rates and overwhelming pressure on hospitals. A hospital in Taizhou city recently announced it had passed two million emergency room visits in recent days, while a video clip uploaded to social media by a Shanghai resident on Sunday showed hundreds of people lining up to get served at the city’s Baoxing Funeral Parlor in Shanghai, with the line stretching out of the gate and onto the street.

“This is what it’s like trying to take a number,” a person is heard saying on the audio. “You need to come early on Monday to get in line.”

An official in China’s political and legal committee system, the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s law enforcement hierarchy, said the massive pressure on crematoriums in the city had prompted municipal civil affairs bureau officials to take control of the sector.

Nobody is now allowed to transport the remains of their dead relatives to funeral homes, but must wait for them to be picked up by funeral home staff, the official told RFA on condition of anonymity.

The official said the current wave of infections is driven by government pressure to reboot the economy after months of damage under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy, and suggests the government is pursuing “herd immunity.”

“They are expressly telling people who have tested positive to go to work, to spread the infection as fast as possible,” the official said. “It’s like this all over the country now.”

Employees who answered the phone at several Beijing funeral homes on Dec. 26 confirmed that the restrictions on the transportation of human remains are currently being enforced, amid a ban on hearses lining up outside crematoriums.

Herd immunity with the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has been described as unlikely by immunology professor Danny Altmann, who described Omicron in a July 1 article in The Guardian as “a kind of stealth virus that gets in under the radar without doing too much to alert immune defenses.” 

“Even having had Omicron, we’re not well protected from further infections,” Altmann wrote.

Xia Ming, a professor of political science at New York’s City University of New York, said hospitals and healthcare are themselves seen as a key driver of economic growth.

“Everything is for profit, and everything is seen as a contribution to GDP and to the economy,” Xia said. “The Chinese leadership believes that herd immunity will get China out of the pandemic and rescue the economy, but I’m afraid that’s … an illusion.”

“This kind of blind optimism is reflective of the current state of Chinese politics, which is the blind leading the blind,” he said.

‘It’s like a deluge’

In the absence of data, local governments are issuing estimates of case numbers based on computer modeling, with the eastern city of Qingdao reporting an estimated 500,000 new infections daily in the city.

A Qingdao resident who gave only the nickname John said that was likely an underestimate.

“I think it’s far more than 500,000 … it’s moving so fast, it’s like a deluge,” he said. “I never expected it to spread so fast.”

“There’s a hospital near where I live, with vehicles lined up on the street outside … bringing people for treatment,” he said. “Our whole family is infected.”

Meanwhile, authorities in the eastern province of Zhejiang estimated there were more than one million new infections across the province daily, with similar shortages of mortuary spaces and cremation slots at funeral homes.

Officials announced on Dec. 25 that new cases are likely to hit two million a day at the peak, which they expect will be around Jan. 1.

Medical professionals told Radio Free Asia last week that many of those being treated in hospital have areas of “ground glass opacity” on their lung scans, which was widely seen during the early days of the pandemic when people were made sick by the original strain of COVID-19, prompting speculation that the Omicron variant and the original strain are now mixing in the general population.

Limited antivirals for elite

Former Chinese Red Cross executive Ren Ruihong said there is a limited amount of paxlovid being imported, although the government has consistently refused U.S. help with the current outbreak.

“What this means is that a lot of retired, high-ranking officials have been dying in Beijing … so they are promising to send out [antivirals],” Ren said. “But nobody has gotten any yet.”

Ren said it was unclear whether there would be enough supply to treat anyone outside of the Communist Party elite, however.

An official who answered the phone at the Beijing Municipal Health Commission declined to comment on last week’s leaked document when contacted by Radio Free Asia on Monday.

“Why did you call us? You said we didn’t issue that document … you should try somewhere else,” the official said.

An official who answered the phone at the National Health Commission also declined to comment.

“We’re not sure what you mean … I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about,” the official said.

The news website Caixin reported on Dec. 24 that medical personnel are being sent to Beijing to support local colleagues amid the current outbreak in treating critically ill patients.

However, it cited a doctor as saying it wouldn’t help to transfer medical staff across the country when the outbreak is just as serious elsewhere in China.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

About 185 gaunt and bone-tired Rohingya refugees landed on the coast of Pidie regency in Indonesia’s Aceh province Monday, police said, as reports emerged that another boatload of Rohingya may have sunk at sea.  

Two NGOs confirmed to BenarNews that the new arrivals were from a boat that was at sea for about a month and stranded as food and water supplies dwindled. As many as 20 of the passengers perished, NGO sources said, while the refugees journeyed south across the Andaman Sea as they fled refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Citing information from refugees, a fisherman in Pidie said they told him that more than two dozen people had died and others threw their bodies overboard.    

“The group consists of 83 adult males, 70 adult women and 32 children,” Aceh provincial police spokesman Winardy said, adding that sick refugees were receiving medical treatment.

He declined to give more details.

The boat was the second one carrying Rohingya to land in Aceh – Indonesia’s westernmost province – in as many days. On Christmas Day, 57 Rohingya males arrived in Aceh Besar regency aboard a wooden boat. Thirteen of them were minors, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

A video shared by a local resident showed Monday’s 185 Rohingya newcomers, including women and children, crumpled on the beach, visibly weak, exhausted and emaciated. In the distressing footage, some in the crowd could be heard wailing.

“The refugees were stranded because of very high waves due to the East Wind season,” said Marfian, a leader of the local fishing community. “According to their information, 30 people died and their bodies were thrown into the sea. We don’t know how long they were at sea, and we received information that they were on the open sea a month ago.

‘Like skeletons walking’

The latest arrivals were from the boat with scores of people aboard that had been drifting for days in waters north of Aceh, said Chris Lewa,  director of the Arakan Project, a human rights group that advocates for the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority group from Myanmar.

“I just received confirmation that the latest group which landed this evening is indeed the boat in distress,” Lewa, who is based in Thailand, told BenarNews on Monday.

“Yes, this is the same boat we have been urging people to rescue weeks ago,” said Lilianne Fan, co-founder and international director of the Geutanyoe Foundation, a humanitarian group in Malaysia.

The two NGOs were tracking the boat’s movements at sea, with Lewa keeping in touch regularly with relatives of passengers and plotting the boat’s GPS coordinates via Google Maps. 

“We are extremely alarmed by the condition of the refugees who have been brought ashore,” Fan told BenarNews on Monday night. 

“[W]e saw the videos of the first arrival of these refugees on shore. It looked like skeletons walking onto the shore and collapsing on the beach.”

In recent days and weeks, Lewa and Fan’s groups, as well as other NGOs and the United Nations, were pressing governments in the region to move swiftly to search for and rescue refugees trying to make such perilous and illicit journeys about people-smuggling boats, but to no avail.

“So, I think that as a region we really need to be taking this crisis extremely seriously and we need to learn from this tragedy and prevent sub-humanitarian disasters from happening in the future.”

Senior officials in the coast guard and new government of Fan’s country, Malaysia, had not been responding to multiple phone calls and text messages from BenarNews to inquire what authorities were doing to help people on stranded Rohingya boats.

Every year, hundreds of Rohingya undertake perilous sea crossings as they try to escape from sprawling refugee camps along Bangladesh’s border with Myanmar or their home state of Rakhine in Myanmar, where members of the minority group are persecuted.

The head of the Acehnese branch of the Indonesian human rights group KontraS, Azharul Husna, said children and women were among the group that landed in Pidie on Monday.

“Whether they are the group that were reported to be drifting on the sea, we need to check,” she told BenarNews.

Aceh police spokesman Winardy said police were still collecting information from the refugees.

“There needs to be more coordination with different institutions to address this Rohingya issue, considering their arrivals have become more frequent,” he said in a statement.

A medical team from the IOM was on its way to Pidie, said an IOM spokesperson, Ariani Hasanah.

It was also not immediately clear whether a group of 47 to 50 Bangladeshi migrants were with the Rohingya on the boat that arrived in Pidie.

In interviews with BenarNews last week in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, mothers of some of these migrants had expressed anguish and uncertainty about the fate of their loved ones.

Meanwhile, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said over the weekend that it had received unconfirmed reports “of a separate boat – with 180 Rohingya, missing in the sea.”

“Relatives have lost contact. Those last in touch presume all are dead. We hope against hope this is not the case,” the agency’s Asia-Pacific office said in a message posted via Twitter on Saturday.

When reached on Monday, UNHCR regional spokesman Babar Baloch said “the shocking tragedy was reported to us by sources directly in touch with relatives and those recently rescued. 

“We still hope against hope this is not the case,” he told BenarNews, noting that UNHCR could not independently verify those reports.

He also confirmed that the boat, which may have sunk with 180 people on board, was not the same as the boat that had been drifting off Aceh in recent days.

According to Chris Lewa, of the Arakan Project, the people traveling aboard these two boats were among four groups of Rohingya refugees that had sailed from Cox’s Bazar district in late November. 

These people likely left aboard smaller boats – to avoid detection by the Bangladeshi coast guard – before they were transferred onto four larger boats for their respective journeys on the open sea, Lewa said.

One of the boats, with more than 150 people onboard, was rescued by a Vietnamese oil ship off the coast of Myanmar on Dec. 8 and then towed to shore, Lewa said.

On Dec. 18, one of the other boats, which was transporting 104 people, was rescued by the Sri Lankan Navy.

Last week, the captain of the boat who was now in Sri Lanka sent a message to a relative of his who lives at one of the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, to alert him that one of the other boats may have sunk in early December, Lewa said.

According to the captain in Sri Lanka, their two boats were sailing close together when the other captain sent him a distress call.

The captain had received an “SOS call from the captain of this other boat, which was about to sink, and asking him to transfer the passengers on his boat (from the sinking to the boat later rescued in Sri Lanka) but he refused because he already had engine problem,” Lewa told BenarNews on Monday in an email. 

“His boat was already overcrowded and he feared that an attempt to transfer them would result in everyone sinking.” 

Nisha David in Kuala Lumpur, Nontarat Phaicharoen in Bangkok, and Imran Vittachi in Washington contributed to this report by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news service.

It’s morning in the Colombian port town of Necoclí, and a large group of Chinese nationals, including three children and a woman with a baby, have their lifejackets on, waiting for a launch to take them across the Gulf of Urabá to a landing point in neighboring Panama.

Elsewhere in the town, people of Chinese descent — mostly young or middle-aged and predominantly male — can be seen buying up camping gear and waterproof boots, while others eat in local restaurants with Caribbean salsa blaring outside, despite not knowing a word of Spanish.

They are preparing to brave the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous people-smuggling routes to the United States, joining hundreds of thousands of others from Venezuela, Haiti, Ecuador and further afield whose tents once turned Necoclí’s beaches into scenes resembling a summer festival.

Many businesses have grown up in the town to accommodate their needs, often because the people-smuggling business is far more lucrative than tourism.

“Selling boat tickets to immigrants is a much more important [part of our business] than the tourism business,” yacht company owner Freddy Marín says, adding that he sees his company as rendering a valuable service to people in need of help.

Some 80% of Marín’s customers come from this trade, he says.

One group of five Chinese travelers eating in one of the cafes says they didn’t know each other before they arrived in town, but found each other via social media, and are relying on translation apps to get around the language barrier.

Two of the waiting boat passengers immediately cite the Chinese Communist Party’s zero-COVID policy as the main driver of their decision to join the droves of mostly middle class people leaving China, in a phenomenon that has come to be known as “run,” a play on a Chinese character that sounds a little like the English word by the same name.

‘Longing for freedom’

“I couldn’t take it any more, so I left to travel, and see the world,” a young father from Beijing who gave only the pseudonym Zhifeng says with a wry smile. He is sitting on a concrete bench near the dock, wearing flip-flops. He left China along with his 10-year-old son in August.

“I couldn’t bear that my son had to do COVID-19 tests at school every day,” Zhifeng says, adding that he didn’t see much hope of change given that Communist Party leader Xi Jinping seemed set to win an unprecedented third term in office at the party congress.

In a more philosophical tone, he muses: “We’re all fleeing persecution and longing for freedom on this journey.”

Back in the cafe, a stylishly dressed young woman says she had high hopes for China’s economic development, but that the rolling lockdowns, mass tracking and compulsory daily testing of the zero-COVID policy were “intolerable,” prompting her to “take a risk.”

She says she may think about going back to China in five or six years’ time.

A young man sitting at the same table shouts: “I won’t be going back while Xi Jinping is still in power!”

The travelers are part of a growing phenomenon of Chinese nationals seeking to brave the notorious Darién Gap people-smuggling route through the jungle from Panama to Colombia in a bid to cross eventually into the United States.

“Coming here is basically a gamble with your life,” says Zhou Jun, a former rights activist and off-road motorcycle fan from the eastern province of Jiangsu.

Zhou, a card-carrying political refugee recognized by the United Nations, says he was held in a psychiatric hospital twice by the authorities in 2017 and in 2019 after he rode his bike into highly restricted parts of the Himalayas, including Tibet.

“We are persecuted, and the fear of the Chinese Communist Party is engraved in our bones,” Zhou says, adding that he has deliberately cut off all contact with his family for fear of exposing them to political reprisals back home.

Zhou, who sports a tattoo of Che Guevara on his upper right arm, has arrived in Colombia by way of Thailand and other Latin American countries, on what he says has been a “profound journey.”

Chinese nationals increasing

Near the jetty where the travelers will embark, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration has set up a tent, while the local government has its own tent facing it. A third canopy provides shade to people waiting to board the next vessel to Panama, who hail from Afghanistan, India, Latin America, the Caribbean, and, more recently, from China.

A local government official in Necoclí who declined to be named said the number of Chinese nationals turning up in the small port has risen significantly since September.

“Most of the adults from China are adults aged 20 to 30, about 80 percent are men, but there are also some women,” the official says. “They are in a slightly better situation than some of the immigrants from other countries, as they have a little money.”

“They can afford to eat in restaurants, buy their own food and pay for their own transportation,” he says. “They usually leave in a few days without any help [from the authorities].”

He says that while many don’t have visas, the authorities prefer to turn a blind eye.

“The current attitude of the Colombian government is to respect the freedom of movement of immigrants,” the official says on condition of anonymity. “From a practical point of view, it is really too expensive to send them back.”

According to data from the Colombian Immigration Agency, 1,028 Chinese citizens entered Colombia from Ecuador through unofficial channels between January and November 2022, 458 of whom did so in November alone.

Nearly all of them pass through Necoclí, the jumping-off point for the notorious Darién Gap people-smuggling route through the jungle from Panama to Colombia, in a bid to cross eventually into the United States. 

According to two shipping companies that ship travelers to the trailhead in Panama, 122 Chinese people have bought tickets during the past week.

It’s not an easy route, and the first hurdle is getting around a current ban on “non-essential” travel out of China.

Those who manage this make landfall in Ecuador, which has visa-free entry for Chinese nationals.

“There are about 30 or 40 Chinese people on my plane from Turkey to [the Ecuadorian capital] Quito,” Zhou Jun tells me. “We know a lot more want to leave, but they are stuck there.”

“Some get stuck in China as they try to leave,” he says.

Narrow escape

Former automobile manufacturing worker Cheng Jie says he had a narrow escape from China when he tried to get to the former Portuguese territory of Macau from mainland China with his family, after they sold off their car and business and borrowed around U.S. $43,000 to get out of the country.

“We were first locked in a small dark room for interrogation,” Cheng said of the family’s bid to cross from the southern city of Zhuhai to Macau.

“When the officer came, I handed over my Hong Kong and Macau travel permit, but he asked me to hand over my passport and asked me a lot of questions,” Cheng recalls. “He also asked me if I was planning to travel to other countries.”

“He took away my mobile phone and passport, and searched my mobile phone with keywords,” Cheng says, adding that he had deleted any politically sensitive content before trying to leave China. “Maybe he was afraid that I was an anti-communist and was going abroad to stir up trouble.”

“I thought we weren’t going to be allowed to leave,” he says. “From that moment on, we decided to come here [to the United States].”

But they had no visa, after Cheng’s bid to apply for a study visa floundered amid the zero-COVID lockdowns.

So the family flew to Bangkok, then Istanbul, where they spent six months, then took a flight to Quito, where they boarded a long-distance bus to Tulcan on the border with Colombia. They rented a car from there, and drove it to Necoclí, before boarding a boat to the Panamanian jungle route via the Gap of Darién.

They were running out of money, so had to opt for a five-day-long trek through the jungle to get to Central America, with Cheng carrying all of the family’s food and camping equipment in a 15 kilogram backpack that he eventually paid someone else U.S. $50 to carry through the grueling jungle mud and freezing rain.

Their journey included fording a turbulent river swollen with torrential rain, from which his wife had to be rescued, and the loss of their tent due to a misunderstanding caused by the language barrier.

“At the time, I didn’t think it was so dangerous that we could have died,” Cheng says. “I was pretty scared watching my kid crying as her mother was washed away.”

Cheng’s wife was fished out of the river by some people behind him, who grabbed her as she was swept closer to the river bank.

Safely in the U.S., Cheng wrote via Twitter: “This place everyone wants to get to may not necessarily be heaven, but you can be sure that the place everyone is willing to risk their lives to escape must be hell.”

‘They can’t tolerate such strict controls’

U.S. immigration lawyer Xu Shujuan said many have no choice but to sneak into the U.S., because they can’t even claim asylum if they arrive by plane, as passengers are denied boarding by airlines if they lack a valid visa.

“There is a growing demand among Chinese clients to emigrate to the United States,” Xu says. “I learned from them that they can’t tolerate such strict controls.”

“They may have money and assets in China but they choose either to sell them or leave them behind in order just to live a normal human existence,” Xu says.

Cheng’s family’s ordeal wasn’t over yet. They were placed in a refugee camp run by the Panamanian government, then took a serpentine route through Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, before finally arriving in Mexico, only to be locked up by border guards overnight before being escorted to get a transit pass.

On the night they crossed the fence from Mexico into the United States, there was a strong wind whipping up sand and dust. On arrival, they were taken into custody by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where they applied for political asylum.

According to Xu, the asylum application process is relatively straightforward for people who arrive in U.S. territory successfully, without being arrested or sent home.

Asylum-seekers may then apply for a work permit and start working legally within 180 days.

Cheng says his family was separated by border officials in the U.S., and his child was held in an area along with his wife, while he was held with the other men.

“They gave us three meals a day, including hamburgers and fruit, so it wasn’t too bad,” he says. “But there were 40 or 50 people in our cell.”

“We had to just lie on the floor, maybe find a piece of cardboard to use as a mat,” he says. “There were so many people that I couldn’t straighten my legs [to go to sleep].”

Cheng’s family was released after just one night in detention, because they had a young child with them.

“I told them that I opposed the Communist Party and the [authoritarian] system,” Cheng says. “I said I had posted certain content online that meant that I would be locked up in a detention center by the communist police if I were to go back.”

He said he has since been approached by many more Chinese people looking to leave.

“I get a lot of people coming to me every day asking me about the route I took, many of them families with children,” he says. “I don’t encourage them, because that route is too dangerous.”

But he recalls that what kept his family going the entire time was the drive to get away from life under a totalitarian regime.

“Once we found out there was a way to escape totalitarian rule, we couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says. “At least here I’m not always scared … and I can say what I want.”

Reported by RFA’s Mandarin Service in collaboration with The Reporter, a Taiwan-based investigative magazine. Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

COLOMBO – Sri Lanka’s Department of Meteorology, yesterday said that, they expect heavy showers in many parts of the country within the next 48 hours.

 

This is caused by a depression over south-west Bay of Bengal, which is moving across the country, the department said, adding that, strong winds can also be expected at times, over the country.

 

Meanwhile, the Irrigation Department said that, the water levels of many reservoirs have increased, due to the heavy rains, warning those who live in low-lying areas near rivers, to be vigilant of floods.

 

The country’s Department of Railways announced that, train services in central Sri Lanka have been disrupted, due to minor rock and earth slips and several trains have been cancelled.

 

The National Building Research Organisation, said that, four districts in the country are facing the risk of landslides, urging the people to be vigilant.

 

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK