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Business News/ News / World/  Covid-19: Chinese travelers head to Hong Kong for mRNA shots
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Covid-19: Chinese travelers head to Hong Kong for mRNA shots

A private hospital in the special Chinese administrative region of Hong Kong welcomed the first batch of mainland people.

Mainland Chinese head to Hong Kong for mRNA COVID vaccines. Premium
Mainland Chinese head to Hong Kong for mRNA COVID vaccines.

Mainland Chinese travelers are heading to Hong Kong for mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, which are not available on China's mainland as the country grapples with a surge in infections, according to the news agency Reuters. 

On Thursday, a private hospital in the special Chinese administrative region of Hong Kong welcomed the first batch of mainland people. This came after five days China reopened its borders for the first time in three years. 

Yoyo Liang, a 36-year old Beijing resident, was one of the first customers at the Virtus Medical Centre where she paid HK$ 1,888 ($241) for her first BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine.

Liang had received three domestically developed vaccine doses from China's Sinovac over the past two years but said she took Pfizer-BioNtech's bivalent booster vaccine to better protect herself against the virus.

"I was very tempted to get the vaccine because of the border reopening. There is no bivalent vaccine available in mainland Chin," she told Reuters after she received her jab.

China abruptly dropped its "zero-Covid" approach last month after three years of enforcing some of the harshest anti-pandemic restrictions in the world that also unleashed a wave of infections that has packed hospitals and overwhelmed crematoriums.

According to official figures, only 37 Covid-related deaths have been recorded in China since last month out of a population of 1.4 billion. 

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) reiterated the need for China's Covid data. It has repeatedly voiced concern that China's official statistics are not showing the true impact of its current surge in Covid cases.

"WHO still believes that deaths are heavily underreported from China," its emergencies director Michael Ryan told media persons.

He Beijing's narrow definition of what constitutes a Covid death, and also pointed to "the need for doctors in the public health system to be encouraged to report these cases, and not discouraged."

 

(With Reuters inputs)

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Published: 13 Jan 2023, 02:11 AM IST
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