In his report on the work of the government, outgoing Premier Li Keqiang said that the Covid-19 pandemic had brought three challenging years. After curbs were relaxed, China’s response will now focus on vulnerable groups such as the elderly, children and people with underlying diseases to prevent severe illness. He said the response should be more scientific and targeted, and the development of new drugs and updated vaccines should be promoted. Zhu Tao, Chief Scientist at CanSino Biologics, said the company is testing a bivalent, inhaled Covid-19 vaccine, as well as a new one based on the messenger RNA technology. Premier Li did not mention the zero-Covid policy which was scrapped in December last year.
China has budgeted CNY170 billion for Covid-19 control this year. The funds would go towards subsidizing local governments, especially those at the county-level, for Covid-19 prevention and control. The total amount would include CNY30 billion in carry-over funds from last year, according to the Ministry of Finance’s report to the National People’s Congress (NPC). Reports from 22 provinces and cities showed they had spent over CNY420 billion on zero-Covid measures, including mass testing, quarantine, contact tracing and vaccination. Guangdong province spent CNY71 billion last year on Covid-19 containment. The figure was CNY43.4 billion for Zhejiang province and CNY30 billion for Beijing.
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention broke ground on a 171,500- square-meter facility in Beijing to improve its infrastructure and research capability. The new facility is a Phase 2 project of the China CDC, and is part of the 102 major construction projects listed in the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-25). It is located in Beijing’s Changping district and is adjacent to the first phase, which was completed in November 2006. The Phase 2 project will comprise research and laboratory buildings, information centers and graduate teaching buildings that cover the fields of chronic diseases, nutrition, maternal and child health, environmental health, radiation protection and occupational diseases.
The city of Wuxi in Jiangsu province has deleted the first batch of 1 billion items of personal data related to Covid-19 in order to avoid data breaches and protect people’s privacy. According to the Wuxi Big Data Administration, the city had collected personal data, such as PCR test results and tracking data of those at risk of infection. Yan Chunshui, Deputy Director of the Administration, said deleting the data helps prevent personal information from being misused, saves storage space, and improves the storage efficiency of local government cloud services. In February, Guangdong province said in a notice that it would delete data relating to the local health code and protect citizens’ privacy. Nearly 900 million people in China applied for health codes during the pandemic, which have been used more than 60 billion times. Users’ data collected by the system usually include names, travel histories, health records and ID numbers. There have been concerns over abuses related to such data.
Chinese embassies in several countries including Russia, Egypt, Singapore, the Maldives and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have announced that travelers coming to China are allowed to use antigen tests instead of nucleic acid tests to board direct flights starting from March 1. The test should be carried out within 48 hours before boarding.
