In . – 12.23.2022 12:46 (act. 12.23.2022 12:49)
The corona pandemic in China is out of control. ©Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP
Due to the out-of-control corona pandemic in China, with up to a million new infections a day, concerns about new virus variants are rising.
China’s health department has asked provincial authorities to regularly test samples of the virus and report the results due to a massive wave of new corona infections.
Fears of new coronavirus variants in China
To discover new variants, China’s health department has instructed provinces to select three hospitals in three cities each to collect samples every week. Once the genomes are decoded, the results will be released within a week. In this way, “possible symptoms, transmission capacity and pathogenicity of new variants with possible biological changes” can be observed in real time, Xu Wenbo, director of the Virus Institute of the Department of Health, was quoted as saying by the Xinhua news agency.
Requirements in Germany for a stopover to China
For fear of new variants of the virus, the spokesman for the German foreign policy of the Union faction, Jürgen Hardt, even asked for the interruption of air connections with the People’s Republic. The explosive numbers of Covid in China caused by the failed policy of the crown threaten the whole world with a new wave of infections”, the CDU parliamentarian told the publishing network Germany (RND). “Only when we are sure that there is no threat of a new and dangerous mutation in China, we must resume air connections”.
But there were also other risk assessments. “I don’t think the situation in China poses a significant additional threat to many other countries,” said Paul Hunter, a British professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. “After all, most of the rest of the world has hybrid immunity,” said the expert, referring to protection from both vaccination and infection. New variants appeared all the time, but each time the abilities seemed to wane, the professor said.
China minimizes massive corona wave in the country
The development is viewed with concern abroad as China downplays the scale and severity of the wave of infections. Health authorities only report a few thousand infections a day, while model calculations by London-based research institute Airfinity currently assume more than a million infections and more than 5,000 deaths a day. The wave will therefore have two peaks in January and March, with possibly 3.7 million and 4.2 million cases per day, respectively.
End of zero-Covid policy in China makes corona number explode
After nearly three years of lockdowns, enforced quarantines and mass testing, the most populous country abruptly lifted its tough Covid-zero policy on Dec. The reason for the turnaround was that infections with the new omicron variants were no longer as severe. But experts saw the reason above all in the fact that strict measures could no longer be maintained in view of the explosive spread. The restrictions have also placed an increasing burden on the second-largest economy.
Since then, the virus has been spreading at breakneck speed among billions of people. In many places, hospitals are full. According to the model’s calculations, hundreds of thousands of deaths are expected.