Two weeks after the government of China abandoned Zero Covid, the coronavirus is surging there, with an estimated 800 million people – more than the population of North America – already infected.
COVID spreading faster than ever in China. 800 million could be infected this winter | PBS - Michaeleen Doucleff & A. Martínez, Goats and Soda:
December 15, 2022 - "China is now facing what is likely the world's largest COVID surge of the pandemic. China's public health officials say that possibly 800 million people could be infected with the coronavirus over the next few months. And several models predict that a half million people could die, possibly more.
""Recently, the deputy director of China CDC, Xiaofeng Liang, who' s a good friend of mine, was announcing through the public media that the first COVID wave may, in fact, infect around 60% of the population,' says Xi Chen, who's a global health researcher at Yale University and an expert on China's health-care system. That means about 10% of the planet's population may become infected over the course of the next 90 days.
"Epidemiologist Ben Cowling agrees with this prediction. 'This surge is going to come very fast, unfortunately. That's the worst thing,' says Cowling, who's at the University of Hong Kong. 'If it was slower, China would have time to prepare'.... Cowling says the virus is spreading faster in China than it's spread ever before anywhere during the pandemic. It also looks to be especially contagious in the Chinese population.
"To estimate a virus's transmissibility, scientists often use a parameter called the reproductive number, or R number. Basically, the R number tells you on average how many people one sick person infects. So for instance, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, in early 2020, the R number was about 2 or 3, Cowling says. At that time, each person spread the virus to 2 to 3 people on average. During the omicron surge here in the U.S. last winter, the R number had jumped up to about 10 or 11, studies have found. Scientists at the China National Health Commission estimate the R number is currently a whopping 16 in China durng this surge....
"Last winter, cases doubled in the U.S. every three days or so. 'Now in China, the doubling time is like hours,' Cowling says. 'Even if you manage to slow it down a bit, it's still going to be doubling very, very quickly. And so the hospitals are going to come under pressure possibly by the end of this month.'
"So why is the virus spreading so explosively there? The reason is that the population has very little immunity to the virus because the vast majority of people have never been infected. Until recently, China has focused on massive quarantines, testing and travel restrictions to keep the virus mostly out of the country. So China prevented most people from getting infected with variants that came before omicron. But that means now nearly all 1.4 billion people are susceptible to an infection....
"About 90% of the population over age 18 have been vaccinated with two shots of a Chinese vaccine. This course offers good protection against severe disease, Cowling says, but it doesn't protect against an infection. Furthermore, adults over age 60 need three shots of the vaccine to protect against severe disease, Cowling's research has found. Only about 50% of older people have received that third shot, NPR has reported. And that leaves about 11 million people still at high risk for hospitalization and death."
"Several models have predicted a large death toll for this initial surge, with at least a half million deaths, perhaps up to a million. But that number, Chen says, depends a lot on two factors.First off, people's behavior. If people at high risk continue to quarantine voluntarily, the death toll could be lower. Second, how well the health-care system holds up under this pressure. 'This is going to be a major test – and it's unprecedented,' he says. 'In my memory, I have never seen such a challenge to the Chinese health-care system.'"
Crematoriums in China struggle as COVID spreads | Al Jazeera, Dec. 20, 2022:
No comments:
Post a Comment