As Wuhan reports no new cases, a report looks at China’s

As Wuhan reports no new cases, a report looks at China’s flight patterns

17:09 02 June 2020 Read: 1230

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China said on Tuesday that Wuhan, the city where the pandemic began, had reported no new symptomatic or asymptomatic infections on Monday for the second straight day. Sunday was the first day that both tallies were zero since the city’s outbreak began.

Separately, the European Chamber of Commerce in China issued a report decrying the rapid proliferation in recent years of long-haul international flights to and from second-tier and third-tier Chinese cities. That includes Wuhan, where 19 flights left the city in January alone carrying about 4,000 travelers to New York or San Francisco, according to VariFlight, an aviation data company based in China.

The pandemic has resulted in the temporary suspension of almost all of these services, according to the chamber, which focused its analysis on flights last year and prepared most of its report before the pandemic began. Philippe Bardol, the chairman of the chamber’s aviation and aerospace working group, declined to discuss Wuhan specifically.

A New York Times analysis in March found that international flights from Wuhan and other Chinese cities continued as normal through much of January, even as the outbreak moved across the country. Thousands of people flew out of Wuhan to New York, Sydney, Bangkok and other cities. (Bangkok is where the first known overseas case appeared in mid-January, in a 61-year-old woman who had traveled from Wuhan despite having a fever, headache and a sore throat.)

The pandemic has brought new attention to the steep rise in recent years of nonstop flights to the United States from an ever-lengthening list of cities.

Rapid growth in long-haul flights from second-tier and third-tier Chinese cities before the pandemic meant that people who used to change planes in Beijing or Shanghai could fly straight from Europe into smaller cities instead. Mr. Bardol said that eroded the number of passengers and profitability for European carriers on their routes from Europe to Beijing or Shanghai.

Smaller Chinese carriers tend to be headquartered in second-tier or third-tier cities, which often own stakes in the carriers as well and subsidize their new international flights. Before the pandemic hit, these cities wanted more international flights so as to increase tourism and make themselves more viable candidates when big companies chose where to locate their offices.

New York Times

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