New Coronavirus News from 16 Jan 2023

China braces for Covid surge as lunar new year travel rush begins [ABC News, 16 Jan 2023]

Luggage-laden passengers flocked to railway stations and airports in China’s megacities on Monday, heading home for holidays that health experts fear could intensify a Covid-19 outbreak that has claimed thousands of lives.

After three years of strict and suffocating anti-virus controls, China in early December abruptly abandoned its zero-Covid policy, letting the virus run freely through its population of 1.4 billion.

Authorities on Saturday said nearly 60,000 people with Covid had died in hospitals between 8 December and 12 January, a huge increase from previous figures that had been criticised by the World Health Organization for not reflecting the scale and severity of the outbreak.

Even those numbers most likely excluded many people dying at home, especially in rural areas with weaker medical systems, one health expert has said. Several experts forecast more than 1 million people in China will die from the disease this year.

Ahead of the lunar new year holidays, also known as the spring festival, which officially starts on 21 January, state media has been filled with stories of rural hospitals and clinics bolstering their supplies of drugs and equipment.

“The peak of Covid infection in our village has passed, but the spring festival is approaching and there are still left-behind villagers, especially elderly people, at risk of secondary infection,” a doctor in Shaanxi province said in an article by regional news outlet Red Star News.

“If the anti-viral and other drugs were more abundant, I would be more confident.”

As well as fever drugs and oxygen supplies, China’s National Health Commission has said it would equip every village clinic with pulse oximeters, fingertip devices commonly used during the pandemic to quickly check oxygen levels.

Beijing’s main rail station has been packed with passengers leaving the capital in recent days, according to witnesses.

In China’s most populous city, Shanghai, temporary night trains have been added to meet demand for travellers heading to the eastern Anhui province, China’s official state news agency Xinhua reported.

Meanwhile, daily arrivals in the gambling hub of Macau exceeded 55,000 on Saturday, the highest daily arrivals since the pandemic began.

In Hong Kong, the government has said it would increase the number of people who can pass through designated land-border control points to the mainland to 65,000 people a day from 50,000 between 18 January and 21 January.

China’s transport ministry has said it expects more than 2bn trips in the weeks around the holidays.

The revival of travel in China has lifted expectations of a rebound in the world’s second-largest economy, which is suffering its lowest growth rates in nearly half a century.

Those hopes helped lift Asian equity markets on Monday, adding to gains of 4.2% last week.

China’s blue-chip index was up 0.6% on Monday, while global oil prices have also been supported on expectations of a recovery in demand from China, the world’s top importer.

Chinese data on economic growth, retail sales and industrial output due out this week are certain to be dismal, but markets will probably look past that to how China’s reopening could bolster global growth, analysts say.

New Coronavirus News from 19 Jan 2023

Rural China's subsiding COVID-19 wave suggests virus spread before reopening [CNA, 19 Jan 2023]

MAYIDUI, China: COVID-19 swept swiftly through southern China's rural mountain villages last month, and the wave appears to have subsided - supporting expert theories that the country's most recent outbreak preceded the lifting of restrictions.

China abruptly abandoned its zero-COVID policy in early December, and the explosion in cases that packed hospitals and crematoriums was widely attributed to the sudden reopening.

But in over a dozen communities visited by AFP in Yunnan province and other parts of rural China this month, the surge appears to have peaked weeks earlier than predicted.

On Yunnan's Jingmai mountain, where a handful of mostly Blang ethnic minority hamlets perch on slopes next to tea fields, doctor Zhong Qingfang pinpointed the height of infections to around Dec 20.

"There is basically no one who hasn't been infected," she said, adding that she had to work while ill herself.

Last Wednesday, it was clear cases had ebbed as just three elderly patients sat at the entrance to Zhong's clinic, hooked up to IV drips.

Health centres visited by AFP in east China's Shandong and Anhui earlier this month also appeared less busy compared to the villagers' descriptions of what had happened just weeks before.

The fact that the virus has already passed through even small rural communities suggests "the tail end of the current wave in China", said Paul Tambyah, president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection.

"There is good evidence that cases were beginning to rise in late November," he said.
The World Health Organization has said it believes the current outbreak "started long before any easing of the zero-COVID policy".

Tambyah said that the uptick in infections was in fact the "most likely explanation for the abandonment of the zero-COVID policy in early December".

EMPTY CLINICS
At a hospital in Yunnan's Mayidui Township, signs directed visitors toward a specially constructed fever clinic, while a bright red placard marked the "COVID-positive zone".

But on a sunny afternoon last week, no COVID-19 patients were in sight in the largely empty facility.

Tan, a Chinese medicine practitioner, told AFP she and her colleagues had received up to 80 COVID-19 patients each day during the peak of infections shortly after Jan 1.

In another village, the sole medical practitioner Luo Yongping told AFP that "around half" of the residents had already been infected.

"The peak was one week ago," he said, adding that demand for medicine to treat COVID-19 symptoms had quickly depleted the village's supply.

Most people AFP spoke to said they had been vaccinated.

But Xi Chen, a health policy expert from the Yale School of Public Health, said that in China's rural areas, the efficacy of the jabs was "fast eroded" because the last doses were administered a year ago.

The "unprecedentedly swift COVID spread" points to low levels of immunity among the population, he said.

In contrast to locals AFP spoke to in the country's east in early January, most people interviewed in Yunnan said they didn't know of any deaths in the wave that just passed.

Zhong knew of only one elderly patient who had succumbed.

Central authorities reported almost 60,000 COVID-19 deaths across the country between Dec 8 and Jan 12, though the true toll is likely higher as the figures only include deaths in hospitals.

SECOND WAVE COMING
Chinese leader Xi Jinping said Wednesday he is "concerned" about the virus situation as people head to their rural hometowns ahead of Lunar New Year celebrations.

With hundreds of millions expected to travel, medical staff are on alert for a potential second wave.

Tan from the Mayidui hospital told AFP that its staff had prepared kits for the surrounding villages with antigen tests and medicines.

But in areas AFP visited, few wore facemasks and many downplayed the threat of the virus.

Smoking a cigarette through a metal water pipe, Zhang, a village store owner on Jingmai mountain, dismissed COVID-19 as similar to the flu.

"We would've caught colds anyway in the winter," he said.

"Lots and lots of people got infected," said a woman running a roadside stall in Xinghuoshan village, one of many selling homemade red wine.

"It's not that serious."

China braces for another COVID wave, as first Lunar New Year without restrictions approaches [ABC News, 19 Jan 2023]

By Karson Yiu

Chinese officials said 60,000 people have died since zero-COVID was lifted.

HONG KONG and BEIJING -- With just days to go until the Lunar New Year, throngs of bundled-up travelers shuffle their way through the freezing temperatures towards Beijing Railway Station, the distinctive mishmash of eastern and western styles built in the 1950s to triumphantly herald Mao's "New China."

"We wish Beijing Railway Station all the best for the Year of Rabbit!" shouts a group of youthful security guards, grinning while hoisting up red new year's scrolls. Their crouching colleague preserving it on his phone for social media.

There is almost a sense of normalcy until a lone traveler in a full head-to-toe white hazmat suit, one that had become so ubiquitous in China's age of covid, scurries past, rattling the wheels of his suitcase on the plaza tiles.

They are all rushing towards long-awaited reunions.

This is the first Lunar New Year holiday, also known as the Spring Festival in China, after Beijing dropped nearly all of its zero-COVID measures and the first in over three years without any COVID-related travel restrictions. Chinese officials expect nearly 2.1 billion passenger trips to made during the 40-day travel period around the holiday, normally regarded as the largest annual human migration in the world, doubling the trips made just a year ago when Beijing dissuaded travel to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Amongst the crowds is a Beijing-based office worker in her early thirties surnamed Liu, who is going back home to the northeastern city of Harbin for first time since the pandemic.

China's massive wave of infections after its abandonment of zero-COVID measures appears to be ebbing just as the celebrations and reunions this coming weekend threatens to reignite a new wave.

Liu, however, is not worried. She had recovered recently from the coronavirus and her entire family and her friends back in Harbin have already been through a bout with Covid as well.

The true size and scale of China's "Exit Wave" from nearly three years of restrictions remains unclear, as authorities abandoned the once-ubiquitous mass testing regime almost overnight. Anecdotally, infections seemed to have affected everyone, everywhere all at once.

Scenes of long lines outside Beijing crematoriums and bodies having to be placed on the floor of hospital morgues because of full freezers, repeated themselves in major cities across the country in videos circulated on social media, undercutting China's official toll of 37 COVID-related deaths for much of December.

Space technology firm Maxar released satellite images of increased traffic outside funeral homes across China. One image of a funeral home in eastern city of Huzhou showed a significantly packed parking lot compared to images from a year earlier. When reached by ABC News, a worker there was dismissive, saying the situation "was not the same as been reported by media" before promptly hanging up.

A study released by Peking University's National School of Development last week estimated that up to 900 million or some 64% of the entire population had been affected by COVID-19 by Jan. 11. The study used data extrapolated from online search queries across the country because of the lack of official figures. Articles referencing the study were promptly censored.

In the following days, after weeks of calls for transparency domestically and internationally over China's official numbers, including from World Health Organization, Chinese health officials finally announced that there were nearly 60,000 COVID-19 related deaths at government health facilities in the period since restrictions were relaxed. The majority of deaths were seniors over 65 with underlying diseases, officials said. China had only recorded 5,273 official deaths during most of the pandemic.

Jiao Yahui, director of medical affairs at China's National Health Commission said, "The number of fever clinic visitors is generally on a downward trend after peaking, both in cities and rural areas."

According to officials, emergency patients nationwide peaked at 1.526 million on Jan. 2 and then continued to decline. By Jan. 12, they were down 28.4% from the peak.

At two packed hospitals in Central Beijing visited by ABC News during the height of the wave in December were now relatively quiet this week. The inundated fever clinics at Chaoyang Hospital from mid-December now only had less than a handful of waiting patients. At the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, patient lining up at the respiratory medicine clinic had visibly halved. The constant stream of ambulances to the hospital was noticeably absent and the non-emergency medicine clinics of the hospital were bustling again.

Beijing's Dongjiao crematorium told ABC News that they were still operating around the clock but demand was less than what they were seeing in December when hearses lined for hours outside.

In the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, a suburban funeral cerement store in the Shapingba district told ABC News their business was back to normal. They saw a spike in sales beginning on Dec. 5, even before the zero-COVID U-turn on Dec. 7. They reached their peak sales just few days later on Dec. 10, meaning the virus was likely spreading widely weeks before authorities abandoned their harsh COVID restrictions. At their peak, the store was selling 20 sets of burial garments a day when they would normally only sell four sets.

ABC News reached a family in Chongqing that lost a relative in recent days. They said that the demand at funeral homes appears to have eased and they were able to secure a memorial hall without waiting, though prices remained elevated.

The abrupt shift away from the government's signature zero-COVID strategy which was trumpeted as late as October by Chinese President Xi Jinping as an "all-out people's war" that "protected the people's health and safety" surprised many around the world and within China.

On Tuesday, figures released China's National Bureau of Statistics, showed that China's economy was buckling under the zero-COVID restrictions, missing Beijing's target of 5.5% annual growth, collapsing to only 3% from 8.4% in 2021, the slowest since the 1970s apart from the first year of the pandemic.

"Data still confirms a depressing end to a challenging year for the Chinese economy," said Aidan Yao, Senior Economist at AXA Investment Managers.

Yao, however, believes the Chinese economy bottomed out in December and figures even reflected the beginning of a recovery in the later part of the month as the COVID wave moved past its peak.

"December has likely marked the darkest before the dawn for the Chinese economy. As COVID comes and goes at an extremely fast speed, normalcy is being restored in cities that have passed the peak of infections," said Yao. "Given the current run rate, it is likely that the majority of the country would pass the peak wave by late-January or early-February, paving the way for a sustained and broad-based recovery thereafter."

However, Yao warned, "the spread of the virus in rural China is of a particular concern, given the limited medical infrastructure in many in-land provinces."

"If migrant workers cannot return to cities on time after the Lunar New Year as they have to look after the sick" it would present an added challenge for the economy.

Back outside the Beijing Railway Station, a 26-year old migrant construction worker surnamed Wang is making his way slowly to back home to the city of Yinchuan in the northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. It's also his first trip home in three years.

Forced to transit in Beijing because all direct trains from Shanghai, where he works, were sold out because of this year's demand, Wang admits he's a little apprehensive of a new wave hitting his hometown. He remains one of the few he knows who still hasn't been infected.

New Coronavirus News from 20 Jan 2023

China announces lunar new year censorship crackdown to silence Covid ‘rumours’ [The Guardian, 20 Jan 2023]

Plan to target ‘gloomy sentiments’ across festival period comes as independent health forecasters estimate over 600,000 deaths from Covid

Chinese cyber authorities have announced an internet censorship crackdown to ensure there are no “gloomy sentiments” caused by pandemic “rumours” during the lunar new year festival.

It comes as health forecasting firm Airfinity estimated more than 600,000 people have likely died since zero-Covid restrictions were lifted in December – 10 times more than Chinese authorities have officially declared.

The month-long “Spring Festival online improvement” program will target those spreading what authorities deem to be “rumours” about the spread of Covid and patient experiences.

The national cyber administration specified “in-depth rectification of false information and other issues to prevent gloomy sentiments”.

It specifically cited the investigation and punishment of “online rumours related to the epidemic” and “fabricating patient experiences”, as well as producing or sharing fake virus treatments. The announcement said the work would “prevent misleading the public and causing social panic”.

Online, social media has been awash with personal stories of people contracting Covid, struggling to source medication or healthcare, and losing elderly relatives to the disease. The personal experiences of many jarred with the official narrative that the outbreak was under control and the response “science led”, prompting unusual levels of online criticism against the government.

On Saturday health officials announced an updated death toll of almost 60,000 people. The figure included only those who had died in hospital. Previously, the government had only reported about 5,000 Covid deaths since the pandemic began, including just a few dozen since the zero Covid policy was abandoned in early December. It was at odds with widespread reports of fatalities, with some major cities reporting infection rates of up to 90% of their populations.

The ruling Communist party government is hypersensitive to foreign criticism of its Covid response and accusations that it is not being transparent with data. Early warnings about the outbreak by Chinese doctor Li Wenliang were initially dismissed and punished as rumour. More recent reporting on the mass outbreak following the lifting of restrictions was branded a “China-bashing carnival” in state media.

Health officials have claimed the current wave of infections has peaked, but it followed warnings of further infections spread across lunar new year as hundreds of millions of people travel across the country. People were urged not to visit elderly relatives unless necessary.

On Thursday, independent forecaster Airfinity said their new modelling had raised estimates of case numbers and fatalities in China. It said the number of deaths since December was now estimated at 608,000, up from the previous estimate of 437,000.

The organisation also changed its forecast of two successive infection waves to one, which was “larger and more severe”, bringing as many as 62m new cases over the 14-day holiday period.

“Deaths are forecast to peak at 36,000 a day on the 26th of January during the Lunar New Year Festival. This is up from our previous estimate of deaths peaking at 25,000 a day,” it said.

“The implication of one larger wave as opposed to two smaller ones is increased pressure on hospitals and crematoriums and therefore also potentially a higher case fatality ratio.”

China’s censors have appeared to struggle to control critical social media commentary in the wake of the zero Covid policy reversal. The new program shows a renewed effort to stamp out dissent, and ensure China’s online environment reflects the Party’s image and ideals.

“After all this, they will say you have to be happy, it will be politically incorrect if you are not happy,” said one Chinese Twitter user in response.

“It seems that the best way to solve the problem is to ‘cover your mouth’.” said another. “I can’t say anything but praise.”

The Spring festival program also continues an ongoing crackdown on excessive fan culture and illegal gambling, and targets online glorification of excessive consumption and wealth.

As examples, it cited people deliberately showing off their “luxury life” with excessive dinners, year-end bonuses, large red envelopes of cash (a traditional New Years gift) and expensive gifts.

The administration said it would also “investigate and deal with the deliberate displaying of images of overeating and drinking during the Spring Festival, and promoting extravagant and wasteful information.”

COVID casts shadow over Lunar New Year celebrations in China [PBS NewsHour, 20 Jan 2023]

Medical experts predict China could see tens of thousands of deaths a day over the Lunar New Year holiday. Since the dismantling of the government’s zero-COVID policy, many have been anxious about the wave of infections that have swept through. As special correspondent Richard Kimber reports, most are brushing risks and fears aside to celebrate the most important festival on the Chinese calendar.

Read the Full Transcript
• Geoff Bennett:
Since the abrupt dismantling of the Chinese government's zero COVID policy, many people have been anxious about China opening up to the rest of the world and the wave of infections that have swept through the country.

But, as special correspondent Richard Kimber reports, most are brushing risks and fears aside to celebrate the most important festival on the Chinese calendar, the lunar new year.
• Richard Kimber:
It's just days to go before the start of the Spring Festival. In Beijing, the holiday rush has already begun.

This is the first time mass travel without COVID restrictions has been allowed in nearly three years. For many of the capital's migrant workers who come to make a better living for their families, it's an emotional return home to be with their loved ones.

Qin Ziguang from Changchun in Northeastern China hasn't been back in five years.
•　Qin Ziguang, Migrant Worker (through translator):
Finally, I'm going back home. Before, I was quite busy in Beijing, and, in the past few years, I couldn't go back because of the epidemic.
•　Richard Kimber:
China's Ministry of Transport says it expects travel to double compared to a year ago to more than two billion trips over the holiday period. It would mark a recovery to 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Scenes at the railway station are in stark contrast with how it looked before China abandoned its strict zero COVID approach, following widespread anger over pandemic curbs. Gone are the security personnel dressed in hazmat suits that patrolled transport hubs. And Q.R. health code checkpoints where people have to verify their health status before entering are nowhere to be seen either.
•　Qin Ziguang (through translator):
Of course, it's now more convenient. It's easy coming in and out. I can go wherever I want.
•　Richard Kimber:
But now the virus has been let loose, some aren't taking chances.

One man we spoke to called Hua said, even though he's returning home, he won't be visiting friends or relatives.
•　Hua, Property Manager (through translator):
The epidemic hasn't ended. I wear this to protect myself, as well as others.
• Richard Kimber:
London-based health analytics firm Airfinity forecasts that China could see as many as 36,000 deaths a day over the Spring Festival holidays.

Over the past two months, COVID-19 has ripped through the country, crowding out hospitals and filling crematoriums like this one. Officially, about 60,000 people have died of COVID-19 since early December. That's according to China's National Health Commission. Medical experts say the true figure could be 10 times that. But it's hard to say exactly where the death toll stands.

The World Health Organization has accused China of underestimating the severity of its outbreak. Earlier this month, it also said a lack of data from the country was making it difficult to help manage the risks.

Mike Ryan is executive director of the WHO.
•　Dr. Mike Ryan, Executive Director, World Health Organization:
We do want and are working ever closer with our colleagues in China to try and understand better the transmission dynamics. But we still do not have adequate information to make a full comprehensive risk assessment. And, therefore, we will continue to try to encourage access to that data.
•　Richard Kimber:
Medical experts have also warned that the rapid spread of the virus now might make the emergence of mutations more likely.

Several countries, including the U.S., have imposed travel restrictions on arrivals from China.

But, at the same time, many other places are welcoming the return of Chinese tourists, among them, Hong Kong. It's a special administrative region of China. Even it had been largely cut off from the mainland until borders fully reopened this month.

The high-speed rail line behind me that connects the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong has been closed throughout the pandemic. Now its reopening is expected to see a surge in the number of Chinese tourists coming across the border. And just to give you an idea of how important that is for the Hong Kong economy, before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than two-thirds of the 56 million arrivals into Hong Kong from overseas came from across the border.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the city has fallen into a deep recession. Many people are praying a rebound in retail and tourism will help lift the economy. But economists remain pessimistic and say a meaningful recovery could take much longer.

Its fate is tied closely to the mainland's uncertain outlook. China's surveyed unemployment rate for December likely stood above the government's targeted ceiling of 5.5 percent.

Dan Wang is chief economist with Hang Seng Bank.
•　Dan Wang, Chief Economist, Hang Seng Bank:
With this kind of high unemployment rate, people's expectation for future growth prospect is quite low. And, with that, that means, even if we see some of the rebound for the tourist sites and big cities, the general recovery will not really be there. We really have to wait until 2024 before we see the general recovery.
•　Richard Kimber:
But, as the country marks its first Spring Festival free from COVID restrictions, many people are simply celebrating the moment and hoping to put the past few tough years behind them.

Covid Catastrophe Looms for China's New Year Travelers [Bloomberg, 20 Jan 2023]

• Sparse health care, elderly residents put rural China at risk
• World’s largest outbreak to spread across China during holiday

The sudden dismantling of China’s Covid Zero restrictions in December means hundreds of millions of people are headed home for the Lunar New Year holiday for the first time since 2019. The crush of travel risks supercharging the world’s biggest Covid outbreak, spreading it to every corner of the country.

Travelers, from migrant workers to college students to educated urban elites, risk carrying the highly-infectious omicron strain with them to Covid-naive swathes of rural China that have managed to evade the pandemic - until now.

Known as the world’s biggest human migration, the holiday traditionally involves packed planes, trains, buses and ferries departing big cities along China’s prosperous eastern coast for remote hinterlands as workers reunite with their families ahead of the new lunar year, which begins on Sunday. This year, they may be bringing Covid-19 with them, and exposing their loved ones to it for the first time.

Some 2.1 billion trips are expected to take place during the 40-day Spring Festival period, double the number of treks from last year.

“There is a lot of jubilation around going home to celebrate the Chinese New Year, but that could also bring about tragedy for a lot of families,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at University of California, Los Angeles.

Chinese President Xi Jinping singled out Covid’s rural spread in a nationwide video address he held before the holiday, saying he’s especially concerned about efforts to battle Covid in the countryside. Health experts are worried the virus could ravage the vulnerable in villages with sparse health care infrastructure, creating worse outcomes than the outbreaks that have already strained hospitals, overwhelmed crematoriums and crippled the nation’s megacities.

Rural China is particularly susceptible to harm from Covid, Zhang said. Nearly one in four residents are aged 60 or older, compared to 19% of the total population, a group that’s comparatively less vaccinated and more likely to develop complications. Many people are unfamiliar with the virus, with no exposure or natural immunity to the infection.

Meanwhile, medical resources in remote areas are scarce. There are only 1.62 doctors and nurses combined for every 1,000 people in rural China, compared to 2.9 doctors and 3.3 nurses nationally. Access to intensive care with experienced doctors and equipment like ventilators to help gravely ill patients survive is often miles away.

Megacities Hit
The predicative health analytics firm Airfinity Ltd. raised its estimate for China’s coming Covid deaths to peak at 36,000 a day, an increase of 11,000 every 24 hours from a previous forecast, after taking into account travel for the upcoming holiday. The London-based pandemic-tracking firm initially anticipated two Covid surges, one before and one after the Chinese New Year celebration. Now it says unfettered New Year travel will likely merge them into one massive wave.

The result is likely “a significant burden on China’s healthcare system for the next fortnight,” said Airfinity’s analytic director Matt Linley. “Many treatable patients could die due to overcrowded hospitals and lack of care.”

The virus has quickly raced through China’s megacities and highly settled regions. Henan, one of the country’s most populous provinces, said nearly 90% of its residents have been infected. Top-tier cities, from the nation’s capital Beijing and financial center Shanghai to the southern trade hub Guangzhou, have all said their outbreaks have peaked.

The sudden avalanche of disease, with some researchers projecting that more than than 900 million of the country’s 1.4 billion people have been infected, led to persistent shortages of everything from basic drugs to reduce fever to potent antivirals like Pfizer Inc.’s Paxlovid.

Covid Rips Through Rural China Ahead of Lunar New Year Migration
The true toll of the outbreak in rural areas may be hard to decipher. Government censors, concerned that overwhelmed villages and death reports from the heartland could undermine New Year celebrations, are getting more active.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet watchdog, recently vowed to double down on what it called Covid-related rumors ranging from fabricating estimates of the virus’s spread to experiences of getting sick that may mislead the public and cause public panic.

Health authorities, meanwhile, issued a slew of directives urging local governments to improve hospital preparation and help them work with rural clinics to handle patients with severe infections. The agriculture ministry is sending one oxygen concentrator and two pulse oximeters to village clinics across the country.

Covid Wave May Last Three More Months, China CDC Veteran Warns
It remains to be seen if the help will be sufficient or come in time.

“The plans dedicated to Covid control and prevention in rural areas are well devised, but how to implement them is a big problem,” said Zeng Guang, the former chief scientist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, at a recent seminar.

UCLA’s Zhang said the lack of information about infections makes it hard to predict the scope of severe disease and deaths ahead. Still, the epidemiologist originally from eastern China is worried about the lingering damage, well after the joy from the reunions has faded and travelers have returned to their jobs in distant factories and cities.

“This New Year travel could bring about inevitably catastrophic consequences for many families,” he said.

— With assistance by John Liu and Dong Lyu

Direct Air Capture (DAC) since 12 Jan 2023

7 locations in Japan and abroad selected for underground CO2 capture and storage...Government aims for early commercialization through intensive support [The Yomiuri Shimbun, 13 Jun 2023]

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has selected seven sites in Japan and abroad for the commercialization of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS), which is considered a trump card in the fight against global warming, with the aim of establishing a business model quickly through intensive government support. The government will soon make an announcement and begin providing business support from fiscal 2023.

The selected sites are off the coast of Kyushu, which is planned by the Eneos Group and Power Development Corporation, and the coast of Hokkaido, which is under consideration by Idemitsu Kosan and others, as well as a total of five domestic sites in Tohoku, Niigata, and the Tokyo metropolitan area, and two overseas sites off Malaysia and in the waters of Oceania.

All of these projects are led by Japanese companies and aim to collect CO2 from thermal power plants and oil refineries and transport it by ship or pipeline for storage.

CCS has been in practical use overseas since the 1990s, but in Japan it has been limited to demonstration experiments because the initial cost is huge, several tens of billions of yen, and profitability is difficult to predict.

In April, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) publicly solicited "advanced projects" for support in order to hasten the commercialization of CCS in Japan. A committee of academic experts narrowed down the list to seven locations after carefully examining CO2 capture and transport methods, storage areas, and other factors.

The government has set a goal of storing 6 to 12 million tons of CO2 underground annually by the year 2008. If the seven sites are commercialized, it is expected that approximately 13 million tons of CO2, equivalent to slightly more than 1% of Japan's annual CO2 emissions, will be stored by FY30.

The companies participating in each project will sign an outsourcing contract with the Japan Energy, Metals and Minerals Corporation (JOGMEC), which is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and in fiscal 2011 will proceed with the design of CO2 capture facilities and surveys to select the storage areas.

According to METI's calculations, in order to achieve "carbon neutrality," which means virtually zero CO2 emissions by the year 50, the amount of CO2 stored by CCS should be 120 to 240 million tons per year.

CCS = Technology that captures carbon dioxide and traps it on the seabed or underground, effectively reducing emissions. CCS is an acronym for Carbon Dioxide, Capture, and Storage.

Cheaper method to capture carbon dioxide could shake up industry [Chemistry World, 23 May 2023]

BY BÁRBARA PINHO23 MAY 2023

Scientists have created a guanidinium sulfate salt that can capture and store carbon dioxide at ambient pressures and temperatures, with little energy input. The strategy could change how industry captures, transports and stores the gas.
An international team of scientists charged an aqueous Gua2SO4 solution with carbon dioxide and saw a single-crystalline guanidinium sulfate-based clathrate salt form at ambient conditions. Because the solution encased carbon dioxide without forming strong bonds with the gas, researchers were able to easily reverse the process to release the gas again.
Cafer Yavuz, a researcher from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and one of the study authors, says that releasing trapped carbon dioxide has never been so easy. ‘All you have to do is just take this [resulting precipitate], shovel it into water, the water dissolves the salt and CO2 comes up,’ he explains. ‘It’s almost like the tablets we use to drink vitamin C. You put it in the water and bubbles [appear]. It’s CO2 coming up.’
After the carbon dioxide was released, the team found that the resulting Gua2SO4 solution was immediately ready for another cycle of carbon dioxide uptake.
Currently, the most common method of removing carbon dioxide from a gas stream involves capturing the molecule via chemisorption, usually using an amine sorbent. While this strategy is highly selective for carbon dioxide, the energy demand is high. Gua2SO4captures the gas equally well without expending nearly as much energy.
‘It’s unique, because it has perfect selectivity like in chemisorption. But no chemical bonds are formed between CO2 and the host, like in physisorption. It’s weird. It’s in between, it’s a quasi-chemisorption quasi-physisorption state,’ adds Yavuz.
But while the salt looks promising for the carbon capture industry, Yavuz foresees other applications. Because the resulting powder is stable at ambient conditions, the clathrate could be useful to carry and store CO2, as well as capture it from industrial sources. This isn’t necessarily a problem that needs to be solved because there’s already infrastructure to transport and store CO2, but Yavuz still believes the clathrate could improve the entire carbon capture chain and cut down on costly infrastructure. ‘The best thing this powder [could be] used for is for the mobility of CO2, to carry [it] in a truck or for storing it,’ Yavuz adds.
Alexander Forse, who works on new materials for carbon capture at the University of Cambridge and was not involved in the study, says the work is impressive, and applying it to real-world scenarios will be an interesting next step. ‘This is an exciting new way to think about capturing carbon dioxide from industrial emissions like cement plants,’ he says. ‘I’m curious to see how energy-efficient this technology can be, and whether the kinetics are rapid enough to enable a practical carbon capture system.’

References
Z Xiang et al, Cell Rep. Phys. Sci., 2023, 4, 101383 (DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2023.101383)

Georgia Tech College of Engineering Carbon capture: how does CO2 removal work? [Phys.org, 19 Jan 2023]

by Marlowe HOOD

With global temperatures still on the rise, even the most sceptical of scientists agree that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is crucial to meet the Paris Agreement goal of capping global warming below two degrees Celsius.

A new global assessment published Thursday says limiting global warming at liveable levels will be impossible without massively scaling up CDR.

But even the most ardent promoters of carbon removal technology insist that slashing emissions remains the primary objective, even if the continued failure to do so has pushed CDR sharply higher on the climate agenda.

Methods range from conventional techniques like restoring or expanding CO2-absorbing forests and wetlands, to more novel technologies such as direct air capture.

Here AFP explains the essentials on CO2 removal:

What is CO2 removal?
There are basically two ways to extract CO2 from thin air.

One is to boost nature's capacity to absorb and stockpile carbon. Healing degraded forests, restoring mangroves, industrial-scale tree planting, boosting carbon uptake in rocks or the ocean—all fall under the hotly debated category of "nature-based solutions".

The second way—called direct air capture—uses chemical processes to strip out CO2, then recycles it for industrial use or locks it away in porous rock formations, unused coal beds or saline aquifers.

A variation known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, combines elements from both approaches.

Wood pellets or other biomass is converted into biofuels or burned to drive turbines that generate electricity. The CO2emitted is roughly cancelled out by the CO2 absorbed during plant growth.

But when carbon dioxide in the power plant's exhaust is syphoned off and stored underground, the process becomes a net-negative technology.

Do we really need it?
Yes, for a couple of reasons.

Even if the world begins drawing down carbon pollution by three, four or five percent each year—and that is a significant "if"—some sectors like cement and steel production, long-haul aviation and agriculture are expected to maintain significant emission levels for decades.

The first-ever State of Carbon Dioxide report concluded that CDR must extract between 450 billion and 1.1 trillion tonnes of CO2 over the remainder of the 21st century—the equivalent of 10 to 30 times annual CO2 emissions today.

And there is another reason.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes it alarmingly clear that the 1.5C threshold will be breached in the coming decades no matter how aggressively greenhouse gases are drawn down.

CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, which means that the only way to bring Earth's average surface temperature back under the wire by 2100 is to suck some of it out of the air.

What's hot, what's not?
BECCS was pencilled into IPCC climate models more than a decade ago as the theoretically cheapest form of negative emissions, but has barely developed since.

A peer-reviewed proposal in 2019 to draw down excess CO2 by planting a trillion trees sparked huge excitement in the media and among gas and oil companies that have made afforestation offsets a central to their efforts to align with Paris treaty goals.

But the idea was sharply criticised by experts, who pointed out that it would require converting twice the area of India into mono-culture tree farms.

The inside of a Climeworks CO2-removal factory in Iceland.

"I don't see a BECCS boom," said Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and an expert on CDR.

Also, planting trees to soak up CO2 is fine—until the forests burn down in climate-enhanced wildfires.

Among all the carbon dioxide removal methods, direct air capture is among the least developed but the most talked about.

How fast can we scale up?
Direct air capture (DAC) is a large-scale industrial process that requires huge amounts of energy to run.

Existing technology is also a long way from making a dent in the problem.

The amount, for example, of CO2 potentially extracted from what will be the world's largest direct air capture plant (36,000 tonnes)—being built in Iceland by Swiss company Climeworks—is equivalent to 30 seconds' worth of current global emissions (about 40 billion tonnes).

But the trajectory of earlier technologies such as solar panels suggests that scaling the industry up to remove billions of tonnes per year is not out of reach.

"It's at the upper end of what we've seen before," University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Gregory Nemet. "It's a huge challenge, but it's not unprecedented."

Climeworks announced last week the world's first certified CO2removal and storage on behalf of paying clients, including Microsoft and software service company Stripe.

Georgia Tech College of Engineering Cutting Emissions Isn't Enough. We Need to Scrub Carbon Directly from the Air [Carbon Brief, 19 Jan 2023]

By Joshua Stewart

New Direct Air Capture Center will leverage Georgia Tech’s leadership in a burgeoning field.
In 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed: they would reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to limit warming of the earth’s atmosphere to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

The Paris Agreement actually aims for 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels to avoid potential catastrophic changes to our climate. But it’s become increasingly clear to climate scientists and policymakers that just reducing emissions is not enough.

“We now know that we probably should have stopped putting massive amounts of CO2 in the air 10, 20, 30 years ago to prevent the climate from getting above 2 degrees C,” said Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech. “Now we've waited so long to reduce our emissions that we need to develop technologies that are referred to as negative emissions technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.”

Jones was one of a handful of scientists who co-authored a landmark National Academies report in 2018 that outlined a variety of approaches to negative emissions. Agricultural practices and forest management are options — essentially using nature’s ability to grab carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away in plants and soil. But Jones said we’ll need quicker and more direct approaches.

“We could plant billions of trees to do this, but there's not enough available land. And the trees don't grow fast enough for us to do this quickly enough to slow global warming at the rate required,” said Jones, John F. Brock III School Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). “That's where direct air capture comes in: It's a chemical engineering way of designing a process that takes CO2 out of the air.”

Direct air capture is a bit like a massive household air purifier — but for the globe. Systems would pull air across specially designed filter materials with molecules that grab CO2. When the filters are saturated, they’re cleaned, and the carbon dioxide is pumped underground for storage in the very places we’ve extracted oil and natural gas over the decades.

It’s a technology proposed only in 1999, with companies launched in 2008, and is now quickly becoming a reality, according to another Georgia Tech chemical engineer, Matthew Realff.

“It's definitely a technology that is moving past the lab; it's in the pilot scale/deployment phase as an initial technology. By 2030, we should see deployment of what I would call the first commercial-scale facilities in different places in the United States — systems that can remove a million tons of CO2 a year,” said Realff, professor and David Wang Sr. Fellow in ChBE. He pointed to a $3.5 billion federal investment to develop four regional direct air capture hubs that was part of federal infrastructure legislation passed in 2021.

“If you're going to make a difference, to be honest, it really needs to be at about 1,000 times that scale, a gigaton scale of direct air capture,” Realff continued. “Some people would argue that we might need even more than that two to three decades from now, depending on how our emissions reduction efforts go.”

Realff and Jones are working at different ends of the direct air capture spectrum — the systems and molecular levels — to develop the technology. In between is ChBE professor Ryan Lively, who works on materials, devices, and processes. Now they’re recruiting more of their Georgia Tech colleagues to the cause with a newly established Direct Air Capture Center (DirACC) within Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute.

The center is an effort to seed interesting ideas across engineering, sciences, policy, and more and leverage Georgia Tech’s longstanding leadership in the area. Lively said DirACC will fill a need nationally to act as a convener of researchers, industry, funders, and other stakeholders.

It is one of a few centers in the nation focused on direct air capture and the first such effort to encompass the complete supply chain of capture and sequestration of CO2 from the air.
Leveraging Longstanding Leadership

“As an institution, Georgia Tech has essentially been involved since the direct air capture field’s infancy,” Jones said.

Jones has led collaborations since 2008 with one of the original startup companies in the field, Global Thermostat. Lively leads an Energy Frontier Research Center that received a rare third round of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2022 and that’s working on how materials for clean-energy technology evolve and degrade. One of the focus areas is direct air capture.

Alongside the 2018 National Academies report, Congress introduced a federal tax credit for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Lawmakers more than tripled those incentives to $180 per ton in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Jones said that got people’s attention.

“Since 2018, we've had billions of dollars of legislation for direct air capture technology research and development. That trend is why we are launching the Direct Air Capture Center now: We really want to communicate to the outside that we are a hub in this space.”

Tim Lieuwen, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute, said the new center will extend beyond developing the science and technology: “It’s exciting to see Georgia Tech also engaging more broadly in the societal-level considerations associated with deployment of direct air capture, including community engagement, workforce development, and ensuring a just transition for historically marginalized populations.”

Just Like in Real Estate, Location Matters
Jones works at the first step of the carbon-capture process: the molecules that link with CO2 to pull it out of the air. One of the areas he’s become most interested in is customizing different materials for different locations and climates.

“A molecule or a material that we studied five years ago maybe failed operating at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. That would not work in Atlanta or in Florida, but maybe it works really well if we go to 50 degrees F or 20 degrees F, and we can deploy it in Montana,” Jones said. “We're starting to think more about whether we might have advantaged materials or advantaged processes in particular locations.”

Chris Jones, left, and Ryan Lively hold two kinds of filters for direct air capture systems. The test rig behind them uses the larger filter Jones is holding.

In a future where direct air capture is widely deployed — say, 20 years from now — Jones said there could be a dozen different solutions customized to different locations around the globe.

He said Georgia Tech has an opportunity to get ahead of that curve and design the right solutions for the right environments.

Realff’s work on systems and process modeling plugs in here. His team works to extrapolate the economics and the lifecycle of materials and lab-scale direct air capture modules to real-world performance. If Jones and Lively have data from experiments at different temperatures and humidities, for example, Realff might model how those materials would work over the course of a year.

“That's the frontier of where we're working right now, understanding how environmental variability impacts the performance of the direct air capture system,” Realff said.

Practicality Matters, Too
Another frontier is engineering carbon capture materials that will last long enough to be economically practical, Lively said.

When Jones creates molecules that grab carbon dioxide out of the air, Lively incorporates them into fibers that can be bundled together or even woven into fabric. Those fibers seem to be durable, but the question is whether the delicate chemistry of the molecules repeatedly capturing and then releasing the CO2 can hold up. The DOE-funded center Lively leads is working in part to better understand how these materials evolve and degrade.

“One of the key cost drivers is, how long can you make these things last?” Lively said. “We know what the answer should be: If you can get them to where they largely maintain their performance for a year to a year and a half, then you're in good shape. We're just not sure if we can get there yet.”

Creating fibers for use in a canister, filter, or other device has become a fairly mature technology, Lively said, so the team is working now to move some of their materials into the commercial market. He’s also experimenting with 3D printing approaches that can create more complex structures with the materials — though at a cost.

“The nice part about 3D printing is you can get really complex structures that you can't get with fibers. But the manufacturing process is fundamentally slower,” Lively said. “The complexity of the device is going to have to make up for the slower rate at which you can make it, because the slower rate will mean higher cost.”

Air Capture and Renewables as a One-Two Punch
One of the newer projects Realff, Jones, and Lively are working on would pair carbon capture systems with wind farms.

They’re exploring systems that would be passive: Instead of relying on some mechanism to blow or draw air across the filters that extract CO2, natural wind would move air across the filters in these systems. It turns out, a wind speed of around 6 meters per second is enough velocity, Realff said — and it’s also just enough to turn a wind turbine and generate power, although higher velocities are preferred.

“If you integrate passive capture with wind farms, now your turbines are helping mix the air.

You could think about having alternating banks of direct air capture and then turbines,” Realff said. “The turbines generate the power to enable the direct air capture system to work; you don't have to connect either one of them to the grid.”

Realff said the system the researchers are developing is relatively simple, using the wind electricity to heat up a resistor and release the carbon dioxide and regenerate the filters so they can remove more CO2. Lively called this “all-electric” approach a second-generation system. Current direct air capture technology uses steam or hot water, for example, to heat the filters and release the captured CO2.

“If you think about it, I want to put a passive contactor where I have a lot of wind — which is also where I want to build a wind farm. There’s a natural coupling of those two,” Realff said.

When A Double-Negative is a Positive
Another emerging idea would pair direct air capture systems with natural gas combined-cycle power plants. These plants use gas to turn a turbine and generate electricity. The waste heat from that process is then used to create steam that turns another turbine and generates more power.

Realff, Jones, and Lively have partnered with ChBE’s Fani Boukouvala and Joe Scott on a project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to instead use that steam to do conventional post-combustion carbon capture and to power a direct air capture system.
“With the combination of those two systems, we can get natural gas combined-cycle plants that can operate and be net negative in their carbon dioxide,” Realff said.

In fact, he said, the reduction in carbon from such a system would be enough to wipe out the carbon emissions of another power plant operating at full capacity.

“For power companies, it gives you a way to get to essentially zero carbon by modifying, say, roughly half your fleet of natural gas combined-cycle plants.”

No Time to Waste
Those kinds of advances will be critical to making direct air capture economical enough to have impact, the researchers said.

Jones called it a generational challenge akin the NASA’s failure-is-not-an-option mantra during the 1960s moon missions.

“The level of funding and interest is pretty enormous, but the challenge, unfortunately, might be even more enormous than the interest,” Lively said. “The longer we wait, the bigger the challenge.”

Solar energy technology was promising but too expensive to be practical when it debuted in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Now, it’s cheap and common. The difference with direct air capture is the timeline: We can’t afford to wait 40 years to scale.

Jones pointed to solar energy as a useful analogy for getting to a future with widespread removal of atmospheric carbon. Initially, the technology was promising but too expensive to be practical when it debuted in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Now, it’s cheap and common. The difference with direct air capture is the timeline: We can’t afford to wait 40 years to scale.

“Today, direct air capture from the initial startup companies costs between, say, $600 and $1,000 a ton. The target, in order to have it be widespread deployed all over the world, is about $100 a ton,” he said. “We can't have a five- or 10-year technology testing period; it's got to be a year or 18 months so that we can build it, operate it, learn from it, revise it, build it, operate it, learn from it. We need to do that five or 10 times to get the cost down.”

A possible carbon-capture milestone in the fight against climate change [CBS News, 12 Jan 2023]

BY IRINA IVANOVA

In what could be a major milestone in the fight against climate change, a startup said Thursday it has started successfully pulling carbon dioxide from the air and burying it underground.

Climeworks announced that it has sequestered CO2 from the atmosphere using its facility in Iceland and stored the substance underground. The action was independently verified by risk management company DNV, and the resulting carbon credits were sold to Microsoft, Shopify and Stripe, the startup's first corporate customers.

Companies purchase carbon credits to offset their own carbon emissions. Microsoft in 2020 made a bold promise to erase its entire carbon footprint since the company's 1975 founding.

Founded in 2009, Climeworks has already successfully demonstrated that its direct-air capture technology works. However, Thursday's milestone marks the first time a company has pulled a significant amount of carbon from the air using a third-party verification process, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"We hope we are growing from a teenager to a grown-up in this industry," Christoph Gebald, co-chief executive of Climeworks, told the newspaper.

Climeworks' direct-air capture (DAC) facility in Hellisheidi, Iceland, in 2021.CLIMEWORKS
Climeworks declined to say how much carbon has been removed — a key metric in assessing how important carbon-capture will be in the fight to slow global warming.

Once its carbon-capture plant in Iceland is at full scale, which it has not yet reached, it will remove 4,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide, a company spokesperson said. That's roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by 800 cars driving for a year.

There is a growing consensus among scientists and policymakers that to prevent the worst effects of global warming, people will need to not only reduce greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero but also remove carbon that has already been emitted.

In addition to low-tech ways of achieving this, such as planting trees and restoring wetlands, the high-tech promise of removing carbon directly from the atmosphere has captured the public imagination and billions of investor dollars.

Congress funneled $12 billion into carbon-capture efforts in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and expanded funding for carbon storage in last year's Inflation Reduction Act.

Private investors, too, are champing at the bit. Last year saw a surge in venture capital dedicated to post-emissions carbon capture, with deals in the second quarter of 2022 hitting a record, according to PitchBook.

Climeworks founders Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher pose in front of the company's carbon-capture facility in Hellisheidi, Iceland in 2021.

CLIMEWORKS
Climeworks has also committed to creating a carbon-capture hub in the Gulf Coast of the U.S., a facility it says will remove 1 million tons of CO2 annually by the end of the decade.

"There is no solution to get to net-zero without carbon capture technology," Collin O'Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said last year, reflecting a common view among environmental scientists.

But despite the hype, some scientists harbor considerable doubt about whether direct-air capture technology can ever advance to the point of economic feasibility. Attempts to clean up U.S. coal plants using carbon capture have largely been an expensive failure, according to a government report, and direct-air capture projects often use tremendous amounts of power — negating their environmental benefits.

A recent study also found that carbon-capture technology would put added stress on the world's water supply, an already scarce resource in many parts of the world.