Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, for the 29th of December.

Just a couple more days left in the year.

Right. I'm going to talk about China and COVID because that seems to be the big overnight story and I'm just looking at

a Twitter poll that I launched on social media 46 minutes ago it says and I have no reason to

doubt that it also says that two over two thousand people

have voted now of course they are all self-selecting people and as with anything to do with

social media you can't be uh you can't put too much trust into what happens but I am really

struck with the results and I'll give you

those in a moment. First of all, though, the picture of what is happening. As you will perhaps

know, after large amounts of protests in China about the impact of the COVID restrictions, zero COVID, as President Xi wanted to make it.

And the authorities have eased the restrictions very severely, very significantly,

and they're now shortly going to allow international travel in large numbers out of China anyway

and I dare say into China quite soon.

But given the way that the rules have just been lifted in China, there are now very, very serious numbers of new cases.

And it is said that out of two flights coming

into Italy from China earlier this week, more than half of the passengers tested positive for

COVID on arrival in Italy. And that's quite a shocking number.

You might expect, what would it be?

You might expect on a typical 200-seater plane,

I would think you might get five,

maybe 10 people who were COVID-positive.

To get the majority is really quite surprising.

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