China is experiencing a huge outbreak of covid-19 after dismantling without warning or preparation in December the strict sanitary restrictions applied for years. But every time More countries are concerned about the lack of information and transparency around Chinese infections.
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However, the Chinese government on Tuesday condemned the imposition of covid tests by a dozen countries on travelers from China, warning that it could take “countermeasures” in retaliation.
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“Some countries have established entry restrictions targeting Chinese travelers only. This has no scientific basis and some practices are unacceptable,” Mao Ning, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, said, adding that China could “take countermeasures, based on the principle of reciprocity”.
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China, it should be said, has kept its borders practically closed to foreigners since 2020. The country has not issued tourist visas for almost three years and imposes a mandatory quarantine upon arrival. This isolation measure will be lifted on January 8, but a covid test will continue to be required less than 48 hours before arriving in China.
But why is there global concern? These are the reasons.
unreliable data
Beijing admitted that the scale of the outbreak became “impossible” to trace after the end of mandatory testing in December. The National Health Commission stopped publishing daily national figures for infections and deaths from the virus.
That responsibility was transferred to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCPE), which only provides figures once a month, after China lowered its disease management protocols on January 8.
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China has reported only 15 deaths from covid-19 since it began to lift restrictions on December 7and shortly thereafter lowered the criteria for determining whether a death was caused by the coronavirus.
This raised concerns that the wave of infections is not properly reflected in official statistics.
The authorities admitted last week that the amount of information collected is “much less” than when PCR tests were mandatory.
CCPE’s Yin Wenwu said authorities collect data from hospitals and local governments, as well as emergency calls and fever medicine sales, all of which will “fill in the gaps” in the data.
Chinese hospitals and crematoriums face surge in patients and dead bodies, especially in rural areas.
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Several countries, such as the United States, Australia and Canada, announced last week the obligation to test those arriving from China, given their lack of transparency with the numbers of infections.
incomplete calculations
Some local and regional authorities began sharing estimated daily infection numbers in December, but the scale of the outbreak remains unclear.
Health authorities in the coastal province of Zhejiang indicated that one million inhabitants were infected per week. The cities of Quzhou and Zhoushan said that at least 30% of the population contracted the virus. The eastern city of Qingdao also estimates about 500,000 infections a day, and the southern industrial hub of Dongguan projected as many as 300,000 a day.
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But health official Wu Zunyou said on Thursday that the peak of infections has already passed in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Tianjin, while Guangdong province, the country’s most populous, said the same on Sunday.
In Shanghai, the epidemic “could have affected 70 percent of the population, that is, 20 to 30 times more” than the previous outbreak in spring 2022, Chen Erzhen, vice president of Ruijin hospital, said in an affiliated blog. to the People’s Daily.
It is difficult to put all these partial data together to obtain a complete picture of the national situation..
Leaked notes from a meeting of health authorities in December revealed that they believed 250 million people were infected in China in the first 20 days of December.
Independent models of infections paint a worrying picture.
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Researchers at the University of Hong Kong calculated that nearly a million Chinese could die this winter as a result of the opening.
The health risk analysis firm Airfinity projected 11,000 deaths and 1.8 million infections per day, with a total death toll of 1.7 million by the end of April.
New variants?
Many countries cited concerns about possible new variants as the reason for testing those arriving from China. But there is still no evidence of new variants that have emerged from the current wave of infections.
Xu Wenbo, a senior CCPE official, said in December that China is creating a genetic database with covid samples obtained from hospitals that would allow them to track mutations.
Chinese health experts have pointed to the omicron sub-variants BA.5.2 and BF.7 as the most common in Beijing, amid public fears that the more deadly delta variant is still in circulation.
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In many Western countries, those variants have been overtaken by the more transmissible XBB and BQ subvariants, which are not yet dominant in China.
Beijing submitted 384 omicron samples to the GISAID global database, according to its website. But the total Chinese entries to that database, 1,308, are fewer than those from other countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Cambodia and Senegal.
Recent Chinese samples “resemble known variants circulating globally”GISAID said on Friday.
Virologist Jin Dong-yan, from the University of Hong Kong, commented on a recent podcast that people need not fear deadlier variants in China.
“I am not saying that the emergence of a (more deadly) variant is impossible, but rather that the possibility is very low,” he added.
AFP
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