China’s most important celebration of the year — the Spring Festival — just ended officially (if not mentally for some), with the country now mostly back at work. The week-long holiday marks the start of the Lunar New Year, and is sort of like a combination of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve all together.

This is also when the fabled “largest human migration on the planet” normally takes place, with hundreds of millions of people usually heading home for family reunions and interrogations.

This year, however, things were different.

For the first time in history, authorities advised workers to stay where they were, introducing a number of policies aimed at discouraging holiday travel in the wake of regional Covid-19 spikes. “Stay put during Spring Festival” (or 就地过年 in Chinese) has become one of the most trending terms as the Year of the Ox has arrived.

Here are 6 notable statistics that tell you how a very different New Year went down.

Travel was Down by Over 70%

Similar to the less-rushed Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays last year in the US as CDC issued stay-at-home holiday travel recommendations, the overall traffic volume by rail, road, air or waterway transport during the Spring Festival in China decreased 76.4% and 43.1% compared to 2019 and 2020 respectively, based on statistics from China’s Ministry of Transport.

Read More at https://radiichina.com/lunar-new-year-2021