In the populous Chinese province, almost 90 percent of the population is infected with the coronavirus

Kan said at a press conference that “6. January 2023, the number of infected in the province reached 89 percent”. The province has a population of 99.4 million people, which means that 88.5 million of them are currently dealing with the infection.

Kan said the biggest influx of patients to clinics related to febrile illness was on December 19 last year, after which “a steady downward trend has been shown”.

The information comes at a time when China fully opened its borders to its residents who decided to travel abroad on January 8, after previous harsh restrictions. The number of tourists is hampered only by the still limited number of flights, direct flights from South Korea to China are sold out.

Restrictions on movement around China, where 34.7 million people traveled on Saturday, have also been lifted.

Kan’s announcement raised doubts about the credibility of official Chinese data. Officially, according to the worldometer.info server, China reports 503,302 cases of infection and 5,272 victims of covid as of Monday, while Johns Hopkins University reports 4.68 million confirmed cases and 17,597 victims.

The World Health Organization has already called on China to provide relevant real-time data. According to some estimates, 5,000 to 9,000 people die from the coronavirus in China every day, and this year the number of victims of covid-19 in the country may exceed one million.

The Chinese Communist Party, which rules in China, defends the end of zero tolerance. On Sunday, an editorial in the party paper Zhenmin z-pao praised the country’s move from “contagion prevention” to “preventing serious disease.” The text reads: “Today the virus is weak, we are stronger.”

The New China agency also writes that the country has entered a “new phase” of the response to covid.

The end of restrictions revived the stock market. Asian shares hit a five-month high on Monday as economists and investors expect easing could revive China’s economy and improve the global market outlook. The hope that the Fed, the US central bank, will not raise interest rates as much also contributed to the growth.

MSCI’s broad Asian index excluding Japan rose 2 percent to hit a five-month high, South Korea’s KS11 gained 2.2 percent, Hong Kong’s HSI rose 1.5 percent. China’s CSI300 index of smaller companies gained 0.7 percent.