China's rural areas brace for the world’s largest human migration amid soaring Covid cases

ITV News' Asia correspondent Debi Edward reports from the Gansu province, a string of villages and towns an hour south of the capital Lanzhou.

For the past three years rural China had remained largely sheltered from the pandemic.

They had to deal with the restrictions imposed as part of the governments zero covid policy, but they didn’t really have to worry about catching the virus itself.

Within weeks of the Covid controls being dropped last month, people were falling sick in even the most remote corners of the country.

We visited one such place in Gansu province. A string of villages and towns an hour south of the capital Lanzhou.

A recent study from Peking University estimated more than 90% of people in this province were infected after the December outbreak began.

It hit the area we visited at the end of the month.

A local Doctor in one clinic told us 13 elderly patients in her small community died in the space of three weeks.

She also got infected but tried to keep working as medicines ran out and people contacted her for help.

Dr Liu is now one of the many medical facilities being warned about a second wave triggered by Chinese New Year when millions will travel from cities to the countryside to celebrate with their families.

But Dr Liu doesn’t have the supplies she would need to cope with another round of ifnections. She has no paracetamol left and just three bottles of ibuprofen.

Other clinics she’s spoken to in the area also report a lack of supplies and the shortages have caused prices to rise.

A bottle of ibuprofen is going for almost three times the price.

The problem is mostly getting Covid related cold and flu drugs but there’s also an issue with medical equipment and regular medicines.

At the weekend an eighty-year-old man came to the clinic with breathing difficulties, and she had to borrow a portable oxygen machine from her neighbour.

She knew they had one they weren’t using after a family member recently died.

In the town a funeral taking place on the day we visited. The wake lasted all day and at regular intervals they were letting off fireworks.

It is a Chinese custom to honour the dead and banish evil spirits.

One of the men at the wake told us to drive up the hillside at the back of the town and we’d see how many people had died recently.

Brightly coloured fake flowers marking out several graves dug into the frozen, barren land, showed us evidence of the toll the virus had already taken there.

When we spoke to a woman working in one of the local flower shops she claimed there must have been 40 or 50 deaths in the recent outbreak, based on the demand she’d had for funeral wreaths.

With no covid checks in place, the Chinese New Year travel rush, the world’s largest human migration, has returned to almost pre-pandemic levels.

Two billion passenger trips are expected to be made during the holiday period which runs to the start of February.

Almost five hundred thousand journeys have been made in the last ten days.

A majority will have already had the virus but there will be some in the mass of people making their way through railway stations, airports and on buses who are still infectious and travelling across the country for what can be large family gatherings.

Dr Liu is hoping the predictions are wrong and the worst is over, not yet to come.

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