China is experiencing a huge Outbreak of Covid19after the end of the strict hygiene restrictions that have been in place for years.
In this regard, more and more countries are concerned about the lack of information and transparency about the actual situation. Below are the reasons for global concern:
Beijing has admitted the extent of the outbreak is “impossible” to trace after mandatory testing ended in December.
Subscribe to O POVO+
Get access to all exclusive content, columnists, unlimited access and discounts in stores, pharmacies and much more.
Sign it
The National Health Commission stopped publishing the daily national tally of infections and deaths from the virus.
That responsibility has been shifted to the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCPE), which provides figures once a month, after China changed its protocol on Jan. 8.
Officially, China has recorded just 15 deaths from Covid19 since it began lifting restrictions on December 7 and changed the criteria for determining whether a death was caused by the coronavirus.
This raised concerns that official statistics were not adequately reflecting the pandemic wave.
Last week, authorities admitted the amount of information collected is “much less” than it was when PCR testing was mandatory.
CCPE’s Yin Wenwu said the authorities are collecting data from hospitals and local governments, as well as emergency calls and fever drug sales.
Hospitals and crematoria are facing an increase in the number of patients and corpses, especially in rural areas.
Several countries such as the United States, Australia and Canada have announced mandatory testing for visitors from China amid a lack of transparency.
Some local and regional authorities began sharing daily infection numbers in December, but the extent of the outbreak remains unclear.
Health officials in the coastal province of Zhejiang said a million people are getting infected every week.
The cities of Quzhou and Zhoushan said at least 30% of the population had contracted the virus.
The city of Qingdao in the east has also estimated around 500,000 infections per day and the industrial hub of Dongguan in the south is forecasting up to 300,000 per day.
But Wu Zunyou assured last Thursday (29) that infections in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Tianjin had already peaked, while Guangdong province, the country’s most populous province, said the same thing on Sunday.
Shanghai’s top infectious disease expert Zhang Wenhong told state media that the city entered its peak on Dec. 22 with about 10 million infected.
Leaked notes from a meeting of health officials in December showed they believe 250 million people were infected in China in the first 20 days of December.
Independent infection models paint a worrying picture.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have calculated that up to a million Chinese could die this winter.
Health risk analysis firm Airfinity forecast 11,000 deaths and 1.8 million infections per day, with 1.7 million total deaths by the end of April.
Many countries have cited concerns about potential new variants as a reason to test those arriving from China. However, there is still no evidence of new strains that have emerged from the current wave of infections.
The CCPE’s Xu Wenbo said in December that China was creating a genetic database of samples from hospitals that would allow mutations to be tracked.
Chinese experts have named Omicron subvariants BA.5.2 and BF.7 as the most common in Beijing amid public concern that the deadlier Delta variant is still in circulation.
In many Western countries, these variants have been replaced by the more transferrable XBB and BQ subvariants, which are not yet dominant in China.
Beijing has submitted 384 Omicron samples to the global GISAID database, according to its website. But the total number of Chinese entries in this database, 1,308, is lower than other countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Cambodia and Senegal.
The recent Chinese samples “similar to known variants circulating around the world,” GISAID reported on Friday (30).
University of Hong Kong virologist Jin Dongyan recently commented in a podcast that people in China need not fear deadlier variants.
“Many places around the world have experienced (widespread infections) but no more deadly or pathogenic variants have emerged,” Jin said.
“I’m not saying it’s impossible for a (more deadly) variant to occur, but that the likelihood is very low,” he added.
About the topic
Doubts, reviews and suggestions? talk to us
keywords
virus china health