Beijing China is experiencing a massive corona wave: According to estimates by the National Health Commission, almost 37 million people were infected with the corona virus every day this week. Around 248 million Chinese were infected with Corona in the first 20 days of December, reports the Bloomberg news agency from circles of the most important Chinese health authority. That is almost 18 percent of the total population.
However, it is unclear how the health commission arrived at these figures. With the opening of China at the beginning of the month, the PCR test sites were closed.
The rapidly increasing numbers are increasing concerns about the development of new virus variants. China’s health authority asked provincial offices to regularly analyze samples of the virus and report the results. In a phone call with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken underlined “the need for transparency for the international community” in dealing with the outbreak.
For fear of new virus variants, the foreign policy spokesman for the Union faction, Jürgen Hardt, called for a stop to flight connections with the People’s Republic. The CDU MP told the editorial network Germany (RND) that “the exploding Covid numbers in China caused by the failed corona policy are threatening the whole world with a new wave of infections”. “Only when we are sure that there is no threat of a new, dangerous mutation from China should we resume flight connections.”
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But there were also other assessments of the risks. “I don’t think the situation in China poses a significant additional threat to many other countries,” said Paul Hunter, a British medical professor 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 contagion. New variants were emerging all the time, but each time the capabilities seemed to diminish, Hunter said.
China wants to look for new variants
To discover new variants, China’s health department instructed provinces to select three hospitals in three cities each to collect samples of 15 infections, 10 serious illnesses and all the dead each week.
After decoding the genomes, the results should be reported within a week. In this way, “possible symptoms, transmission abilities and pathogenicity of new variants with potential biological changes” could be observed in real time, said the director of the virus institute of the public health department, Xu Wenbo, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Developments in China are viewed with concern abroad as the government downplays the scale and severity of the wave of infections. Health authorities report only a few thousand infections every day.
Model calculations by the London-based research institute Airfinity currently assume that there will probably be more than a million infections and more than 5,000 deaths a day. The wave will therefore experience two peaks in January and March with possibly 3.7 million and 4.2 million cases a day, respectively.
After almost three years of lockdowns, forced quarantines and mass testing, the most populous country abruptly lifted its tough zero-Covid policy on December 7th. The reason for the turnaround was that the infections with the new omicron variants were no longer as severe. But experts saw the reason above all in the fact that the strict measures could no longer be maintained in view of the explosive spread. The restrictions had also placed an increasing burden on the second largest economy.
Since then, the virus has been spreading at high speed among billions of people. In many places, hospitals are full. Model calculations predict hundreds of thousands of deaths.
vaccination rate increases
Meanwhile, the vaccination rate in China is increasing, but offers to use corona vaccines from the West are still being rejected by the government. China’s domestic production of medical supplies is expanding and is generally sufficient, a State Department spokesman said when asked about a US offer of help.
Recently it was also discussed whether the German manufacturer Biontech would deliver its vaccine to China. However, the government in Beijing has not indicated that it is considering this. Nevertheless, the first vaccine doses from Biontech have been sent from Germany to China. German citizens living in China can be vaccinated or boosted with the doses, said government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit on Wednesday in Berlin. Around 20,000 Germans currently live in China.
It is the first release of its kind for a western coronavirus vaccine. During his visit to Beijing last month, Chancellor Olaf Scholz campaigned for the vaccination of Germans with Biontech. The permission of the Chinese authorities only applies to Germans.
More: China after the end of zero Covid – empty streets, full hospitals, not enough medicine