Pictured here on December 28, 2022, is a gym-turned-fever clinic in Fuzhou, Fujian Province.
Vuong Dong Minh | China News Service | beautiful pictures
BEIJING — It is unlikely that a new dangerous variant of Covid-19 is spreading in China, said Dr Chris Murray, director of the center for health research at the University of Washington based in Seattle.
His comment on Friday on “Asian Squawk Box” comes as US health officials warned this week of the possibility of a new Covid variant emerging in China’s nationwide outbreak — and how Beijing lacks transparency may delay the detection of public health risks.
Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, points out that there are likely to be billions of omicron infections worldwide this year, but no new Covid variants have emerged, only sub-variants. of omicrons.
“That’s why I would put the risk quite low that there is a dangerous new variant in China,” he said. He notes that “some very special characteristics” will be needed for a new variant to emerge and displace the omicron.
This variant was first discovered in South Africa over a year ago. Omicrons are much more transmissible but cause less severe illness than when Covid first emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
Unlike much of the world, China’s Covid wave this month is affecting a population of 1.4 billion, who are mostly infected for the first time. Only locally produced vaccines will be widely available to the local population.
Beijing this month unexpectedly eased many Covid-related travel restrictions. On Monday, the authorities also said they would domestic quarantine scrap starting January 8at the same time continue to process passports for Chinese citizens who want to travel abroad.
The United States, Japan and several other countries this week then announced Request a new Covid test for visitors from China.
Hospitalization needs, mortality data
Murray said an outright travel ban, if proposed, “wouldn’t make sense” and that he “wouldn’t issue testing requests.”
“The argument being made is that we need to be more transparent about what is happening in China,” Murray said.
“The earliest sign of some new variation would actually be a change in the number of Covid-related hospitalizations or mortality, not just more infections, because we know it,” he said. omicron does that.”
China’s National Health Commission on Sunday said it would stop publishing daily information on Covid-19 infections and deaths. However, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention maintains daily reports – along with the number of hospital discharges, showing only thousands of new Covid-19 cases per day and a handful of deaths. Covid testing is no longer required in China.
Releases on the website of China’s disease control center show that director Shen Hongbing held online meetings this month with his US counterpart and head of the Health Security Administration UK.
covid risk
As for the hypothesis that viruses adapt to keep their hosts alive, Murray cautions that it “applies over a fairly long period of time, not months or years.”
Murray said genomics research shows that there is still a chance of a mutation that causes more severe disease. “I think it would be unwise if we just assumed that all the variations would be the same as the omicron.”
One The study was published in the journal Nature Medicine in November also found that being infected with Covid-19 repeatedly increased the risk of organ failure and death.
