"How racist is this? What about the ones like me who have been living in China for almost ten years? We haven't seen our families in like 3-4 years due to borders being closed," wrote another user on Weibo, who appeared to be a foreigner.https://t.co/56GSkzmERF
Monkeypox: don’t touch foreigners, says China health chief, as first case reported
Official Wu Zunyou also called for people to avoid ‘skin-to-skin contact’ with those who had been abroad recently, as well as ‘strangers’
Reuters
Mon 19 Sep 2022 01.52 BST
A senior Chinese health official has advised people to avoid physical contact with foreigners to prevent possible monkeypox infection after the first known case of the virus on mainland China was reported on Friday.
“To prevent possible monkeypox infection and as part of our healthy lifestyle, it is recommended that 1) you do not have direct skin-to-skin contact with foreigners,” Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted on his official Weibo page on Saturday.
Wu also called for people to avoid “skin-to-skin contact” with people who had been abroad within the past three weeks as well as all “strangers”.
“It is necessary and very important to strengthen the surveillance and prevention of monkeypox epidemic at the social level,” he wrote.
His post was widely shared across social media over the weekend, but the comments section under his initial post were disabled on Sunday and in the early hours of Monday in Beijing.
Some, who commented on forwarded versions or screenshots of his post, questioned why foreigners in China, many of whom are long-term residents and have not left recently due to Covid-19 barriers, were considered more dangerous than locals.
Wu did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on this, sent to his social media account on Monday.
#China is telling its people not to touch foreigners to stop the transmission of #monkeypox: https://t.co/jS0AKuZHR5. The #CCP’s response to most problems these days is xenophobic.
As China just detected its first monkeypox infection among international travelers, China CDC’s chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyou suggests Chinese people not to have “direct skin-to-skin contact with foreigners” to prevent #Monkeypox. Xenophobia on display pic.twitter.com/WIYv931dhq
In measuring excess deaths, the MoH have used the 2019 standardised death rate as their baseline. Their measurement allows for changes in the size and age distribution of the population. Any excess represents a worse mortality RATE compared with 2019. This is good.
They found there were 2,490 excess deaths in the 2.5 years of 2020, 2021 and H1 2022. Covid deaths accounted for 1,403 of the excess deaths (representing 3/5ths of the excess). Most of the excess was during the Delta and Omicron BA.1/B.2 waves. pic.twitter.com/NfrvPjOW59
This is a very interesting finding given we have seen higher numbers of deaths than expected from stroke (as well as ischaemic heart disease) in Australia.
… Key indicators such as the rates of death within 30 days of presenting … with a heart attack or stroke at our public hospitals in years 2020 to 2021 were comparable to rates seen in the previous years."
