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Couple in Wuhan: Harmonious and more peaceful than in the old year?
Photo: HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP
In China, the beginning of a new lunar year will begin on Friday.
The previous year was still in the zodiac of the rat, now it is being replaced by the buffalo.
Fortune tellers predict that it should be more harmonious and peaceful.
After several locally limited Sars-CoV-2 outbreaks, the authorities had asked the billion-dollar population not to travel to their home villages for the most important Chinese family festival this year as usual.
Since every fifth Chinese does not work where their family comes from, China otherwise experiences the world's largest annual mass migration at New Year.
The Ministry of Transport expects the number of trips this year to decrease by 60 percent.
With strict instructions from the authorities and employers, but also with incentives such as monetary gifts, many millions were persuaded not to travel.
Some local agencies simply threatened possible returnees with a two-week forced quarantine so that they could not see their loved ones at the festival and would have to spend most of the New Year's holidays in isolation.
It's the second New Year celebrations that the virus is screwing up for the Chinese.
The first cases broke out in the central Chinese metropolis of Wuhan in December 2019.
After dealing with the new respiratory disease as insufficiently criticized, China took action shortly before the New Year celebrations at the end of January 2020 and cut off more than 50 million people in Wuhan and surrounding cities from the outside world.
With curfews, mass tests, quarantine, contact tracing and strict entry restrictions, the most populous country has largely brought the virus under control.
Life has returned to normal.
During the "Golden Week" around the national holiday in October, there was even a wave of hundreds of millions of Chinese people traveling without restrictions, as it is now, and which had not contributed to a new spread of the virus.
However, the new outbreaks in January in Hebei province just outside Beijing and in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces had once again worried the authorities because they showed gaps in prevention.
So it was again cracked down on and strongly advised against all travel for the New Year celebrations.
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svv / dpa