Coronavirus tally: As Chinese embrace Lunar New Year holiday, they remain wary of surge of COVID cases

Chinese consumers are eager to spend and travel a few days into the first Lunar New Year holiday they are allowed to since the start of the pandemic, but they are wary as a major COVID wave sweeps the nation,MarketWatch's Tanner Brown reported. The 15-day festival has long been called the world's largest migration, in which students and workers return to their hometowns in droves - that is, until COVID hit in 2019. On Saturday, officials said as much as 80% of the population has been infected since the lifting of restrictions in December, equal to 1.2 billion people. In the U.S., the seven-day average of new cases stood at 45,656 on Tuesday, according to a New York Times tracker. That's down 30% from two weeks ago. The daily average for hospitalizations was down 24% at 36,227. The average for deaths was 542, down 7% from two weeks ago. The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 669.3 million on Wednesday, while the death toll rose above 6.74 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. leads the world with 102 million cases and 1,105,204 fatalities.

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