China warns citizens not to go home for Lunar New Year amid new COVID-19 outbreaks

In recent years, Tong Gong would always go back to her hometown in China’s Henan province during the Lunar New Year holiday to reunite with her parents.

This year however, the employee for the Chinese tech giant Tencent decided to stay in the southern city of Shenzhen, the so-called “Silicon Valley of China”, instead of making the trip up north to Luoyang city.

“The epidemic in northern China is pretty serious now, and I am worried that I may not be able to come back to Shenzhen on time afterwards,” Ms Gong told…