Should internal migrants be held accountable for spreading COVID-19?

Abstract

The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has quickly swept through China, and mass internal migration during the Chinese Spring Festival is now widely blamed for this. This statement, we argue, is misleading. Internal migrants should not be held responsible for the initial spread of COVID-19, as those cities first affected are megacities that connect with the epicentre Wuhan more with regard to business and tourism than migration. The scale of the epidemic can only be partially explained by internal migration. Severe outbreaks are not limited to cities that neighbour Hubei Province and that have large migration to Wuhan. They also occurred in provincial capitals that are neither contiguous with Hubei nor connected with Wuhan in terms of migration. Even though a few cities far away from the epicentre were hit severely by COVID-19 due to migration, the major contributor is not the migrant job seekers but business people. The responsibility of spreading COVD-19 so fast, on such a large scale and so far is by no means fully on internal migrants.

What Are the Reasons for the Different COVID-19 Situations in Different Cities of China? A Study from the Perspective of Population Migration

“…Although the absolute size of Wenzhou’s population is not large compared to those of other cities, its businesspeople have a tradition of visiting relatives and friends before the Spring Festival (Xiang and Wang, 2020) [ 27 ]. In other words, they had strong mobility in Wenzhou and were, thus, more likely to spread the virus (Shi and Liu, 2020) [ 21 ]. Additionally, a large number of businesspeople migrated from other cities to Wenzhou.…”

“…Fifth, following Liu (2020), we controlled for four urban construction variables, namely road area per capita, domestic garbage per capita, discharged wastewater per capita, and public recreational green space per capita [ 9 ]. Finally, compared with other cities, provincial capitals may have a closer connection with Wuhan, with more tourism and business flow between them, and are more vulnerable to influences (Shi and Liu, 2020) [ 21 ]; therefore, we added dummy variables for whether the city is a provincial capital. The definitions of these variables are listed in Table 1 .…”

Geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…As the commentaries in this special issue of Dialogues in Human Geography —together with recent editorials and articles in other geography journals (Castree et al, 2020; Desjardins et al, 2020; Malanson, 2020; Shi and Liu, 2020; Sparke and Anguelov, 2020)—demonstrate, the commitment to producing timely, publicly-engaged, and socially relevant scholarship is a view shared by many in the discipline. Our aim in assembling this special issue has been to curate a set of interventions that provides some initial meaningful geographical analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic and contributes to wider academic, political, and public policy debates while also mapping out future research agendas and everyday geographical praxes.…”

Sonhos interrompidos

“…Devido à relação crítica entre o turismo e a propagação de doenças (Hall et al, 2020;Shi & Liu, 2020), os turistas foram aconselhados a evitar viagens desnecessárias (Karim et al, 2020;Raibhandari et al, 2020). Por um lado, o turismo foi severamente impactado; mas é considerado, também, parcialmente responsável pela transmissão da nova doença.…”