China braces for COVID holiday surge as people leave megacities for hometowns

Luggage-laden passengers flocked to railway stations and airports in China’s megacities on Monday, heading home for holidays that health experts fear
could intensify a COVID-19 outbreak that has claimed thousands of lives.
After three years of strict and suffocating anti-virus controls, China in early December abruptly abandoned its “zero COVID” policy, letting the virus run freely through its 1.4 billion population.
Authorities on Saturday said nearly 60,000 people with COVID had died in hospitals between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12, a huge increase from previous figures that had been criticised by the World Health Organisation for not reflecting the scale and severity of the outbreak.
Even those numbers most likely exclude many people dying at home, especially in rural areas with weaker medical systems, one health expert has said.
Several experts forecast more than one million people in China will die from the disease this year.