(TAN): After more than nine months of staying at home, the people of China finally seem to be enjoying a vacation.
With the Covid-19 pandemic largely under control, the Golden Week holiday saw a surge in tourist movement across China. According to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, through the first four days of the week-long holiday that started Oct 1, some 425 million people travelled domestically, reveal media reports.
The Golden Week is an eight-day national holiday, one of China’s busiest annual travel periods, and a major test for the country as it emerges from the novel coronavirus pandemic. China’s officially reported infection numbers have stayed low since the spring. There have been a few flare-ups, but those were contained within weeks.
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China hasn’t reported any case of local virus infection since August 15, though it found two asymptomatic cases in late September. Almost all travel restrictions have been eased. Covid test results are no longer required for cross-province travel.
Consequently, tourists are hitting the streets again. The scene at the Great Wall of China was in stark contrast with what it was a few months ago. The most popular section of the wall, the Badaling section, saw many bare-faced tourists crowded together, reported CNN. On October 3, tickets for the Badaling section were sold out entirely by early morning, according to Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua.
With close to zero local transmissions, massive crowds pressed together in close quarters squeezing past each other through narrow doorways in the tourist destinations of Beijing over the last weekend. Most are wearing face masks — but a number of people, including young children, pulled their masks down to their chin, and a few seem to have foregone masks entirely, reports said.
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According to the South China Morning Post, 15 million trips will be taken by flight between October 1 and 8, while hotel bookings for Golden Week have jumped 50%.
With many parts of the world still struggling to contain the pandemic, for the people of China, the sense of imminent danger seems to have largely faded.
“We have gone at least six weeks without reporting a single confirmed case domestically, which means the environment accessible by ordinary people is virus-free,” media quoted Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre of Disease Control and Prevention as saying at a briefing in Beijing last week. “The chance of you running into an asymptomatic person is very, very low, almost negligible.”
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However experts feel it is not yet time to let the guards down. Nicholas Thomas, associate professor in health security at the City University of Hong Kong, said, “There is undoubtedly a risk in allowing mass tourism to resume and, in some ways, this is an early exercise in what the rest of the world will have to go through as global travel restarts next year.”
