Impact of COVID-19 far from over as families in China still grapple with trauma from previous waves

Beijing [China], July 1 : Families inside and outside of China are still dealing with the trauma from the first Covid wave even though China has declared the second wave to be over, US-based broadcaster, NBC News reported.

With cases peaking in the days before Christmas, China's population was suddenly exposed to coronavirus when the government abruptly lifted "zero-Covid" restrictions in December. After three years of sporadic illnesses, everyone suddenly began to contract Covid.

NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. It is headquartered in New York.

Less than 122,000 Covid-related deaths have been documented in China among its 1.4 billion people, according to the World Health Organisation.

The majority of these deaths have occurred in the two months since the government lifted its zero-Covid restrictions on December 7 in response to unusually large-scale upheaval. Comparatively speaking, the United States, with a population of around 330 million, reported more than 1.1 million Covid deaths, reported NBC News.

The Asia digital editor of NBC News, Jennifer Jett in her article said that a woman who lives in the US, Christmas Eve was interrupted by the news that her mother who, along with her father, had been stranded in China since the start of the pandemic had tested positive for Covid.

She lost her mother, who was 87, in a hospital in a city in northern China. The woman, who asked for anonymity out of concern for herself and her relatives inside and outside of China, described the experience as "totally surreal."

The Chinese government has imprisoned or repressed critics of its approach to the coronavirus, and the international backlash against China's handling of Covid has harmed its relations with the United States and other nations, Jennifer Jett writes for NBC News.

Though her mother's death came at the height of China's worst outbreak of the pandemic, it does not appear to have been counted as being related to Covid.

The woman's parents had been residing in both China and the United States on a permanent basis for many years.

In early 2020, shortly after the virus was discovered for the first time in the city of Wuhan, they travelled to northern China just before the Lunar New Year break. They made the decision to stay put out of concern for travelling before immunisations were available and later learned that the Chinese vaccinations they had gotten had been ineffective.

She died about 16 hours after the positive rapid test. "She never opened her eyes to see us," her daughter said. "She didn't say anything to us," according to NBC News.

Time and again, Chinese social media users have questioned the official statistics, citing an increase in the number of obituaries for well-known academics and a string of reported celebrity deaths. Although the causes of death for such well-known people were rarely disclosed, the timing and personal experiences led to widespread concerns.

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