BEIJING, China (AFP) – China is experiencing a massive surge in COVID-19 after years of strict lockdown restrictions were lifted last month.
Several developing countries are involved in the lack of knowledge and transparency around the outbreak in China.
Here’s why this raises concerns:
Beijing has admitted that the scale of the outbreak is “impossible” to trace after mandatory mass testing ended last month.
The National Health Commission has stopped publishing national statistics on infections and deaths.
That duty was transferred to China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which will release the figures once a month after China downgrades its disease control protocols on Jan. 8.
China has reported just 15 COVID deaths since it began lifting restrictions on Dec. 7, a while later, it tightened the criteria through which coronavirus deaths are recorded.
This has fueled considerations that the wave of infections is not as it should be reflected in official statistics.
Authorities admitted last week that the scale of knowledge collected is “much smaller” than when the mandatory mass PCR tests were conducted.
CDC official Yin Wenwu said the government is now collecting survey information from hospitals and local governments, such as emergency call volumes and fever drug sales, which will “make up for deficiencies in our reporting. “
China’s hospitals and crematoria are grappling with an influx of patients and bodies, and rural spaces are severely affected.
Several countries besides the United States, Australia and Canada said last week they were imposing restrictions on arrivals from China due to a lack of transparency in infection data.
Last month, some local and regional governments began sharing estimated infection totals as the scale of the outbreak remained unclear.
The disease government in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang said Tuesday that the number of new cases has surpassed one million in recent days, and “the outbreak is expected to succeed at a peak plateau in January. “
The cities of Quzhou and Zhoushan in Zhejiang said at least 30 percent of the population had the virus.
The eastern coastal city of Qingdao has also estimated around 500,000 new cases and the production hub of southern Dongguan forecasts up to 300,000.
Authorities in the island province of Hainan estimated Friday that the infection had exceeded 50 percent.
But senior fitness official Wu Zunyou said Thursday that the peak had passed through the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Tianjin, and that Guangzhou city officials followed suit on Sunday.
A senior doctor at a Shanghai hospital estimated Tuesday that up to 70 percent of the city’s 25 million people may have been inflamed by the existing wave.
Leaked notes at a meeting of fitness officials last month revealed they believed another 250 million people had become inflamed in China in the first 20 days of December.
Independent infection patterns paint a grim picture. Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have estimated that nearly a million Chinese could die this winter as a result of the opening.
And health threat research company Airfinity forecast 11,000 deaths and 1. 8 million infections per day, with a total of 1. 7 million deaths at the end of April.
Many countries have cited considerations about possible new variants as an explanation for why test Chinese arrivals for COVID.
But there are still no new strains emerging from the existing wave.
Senior CDC official Xu Wenbo said last month that China is creating a national genetic database of COVID samples derived from hospital surveillance that would help track mutations.
Chinese fitness experts have said in recent days that the Omicron BA. 5. 2 and BF. 7 subvariants are the most prevalent in Beijing, reacting to public fears that the Delta variant is possibly still circulating.
They said Omicron also remained the maximum dominant strain in Shanghai.
In many Western countries, those strains have been overtaken by the more transmissible subvariants XBB and BQ, which are still dominant in China.
Beijing has submitted 384 samples of Omicron over the past month to the GISAID global database, according to its website.
But the country’s total number of submissions to the database of 1,308 is dwarfed by that of other countries, which join the United States, Britain, Cambodia and Senegal.
Recent samples from China “all closely resemble known variants circulating throughout the reported global set . . . between July and December,” GISAID on Friday.
University of Hong Kong virologist Jin Dong-yan said last month on a separate podcast that other people don’t want to worry about the threat of a new, deadlier variant in China.
“Many places in the world experienced [a large-scale infection], but then a more fatal or pathogenic variant appeared,” Jin said.
“I’m saying that the emergence of a [more deadly] strain is absolutely impossible, but the option is very small. “
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