People receive an inhaled vaccine against COVID-19 at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Bijie, Guizhou Province, China, December 29, 2022.
CFOTO | Future publications | Getty’s paintings
US and world health leaders say Beijing is just not sharing enough information about the spread of Covid-19 in China, leaving the international community in the dark about the scale and severity of the current wave of infections in the world’s most populous country.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a Wednesday statement that China’s lack of transparency could delay the identification of latest Covid variants that pose a public health risk. In response to the CDC, China provides only a few genomic sequences used to discover such variants.
On Wednesday, the CDC announced latest testing requirements for airline passengers whose journeys begin in China. All passengers, regardless of nationality or vaccination status, must take a Covid test no later than two days before flying to the US and present a negative result to the airline prior to departure. The necessities go into effect on January 5.
India, Italy, Japan and Taiwan have also imposed Covid testing requirements on airline passengers originating from China. The Chinese government is battling a wave of infections after relaxing its strict no-COVID-19 policy in the wake of civil unrest earlier this yr.
A U.S. federal health official told reporters by phone on Wednesday that the Biden administration has very limited information on the number of latest Covid cases, hospitalizations and especially deaths in China. The official said the number of tests and reporting of the case in the country has also decreased, making it difficult to find out the true infection rate.
China’s zero-Covid policy, which sought to suppress the epidemic with harsh measures, signifies that large parts of the population haven’t any immunity to highly infectious omicron variants, an official said. As a consequence, the Biden administration is projecting that enormous numbers of people might be infected in China relatively quickly.
“We are concerned about a latest variant that will actually emerge in China,” said the official, who declined to be named as a condition of the press subpoena. “With so many individuals in China affected in a brief period of time, there is a likelihood, a probability, that a latest variant could emerge.”
The most recent genome sequencing data released by health authorities in China indicate that the Covid variants circulating in the country are much like those known in the rest of the world, in keeping with an announcement released this week by GISAID, a German-based public database.
In the last 180 days, China sequenced and released 412 Covid cases to GISAID, in comparison with over 576,000 shared by US authorities at 4% and the UK at nearly 12%.
The World Health Organization has also called on China to share more information about what is going on on the ground as the virus spreads.
“WHO may be very concerned about the evolving situation in China and the increasing reports of serious diseases,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the global health agency, at a press conference in Geneva last week.
“To make a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation in the field, WHO needs more detailed information on disease severity, hospital admissions and ICU support requirements,” Tedros said.
WHO has largely anecdotal reports of emergency departments and in some cases intensive care units filling up in China, in keeping with Dr. Mike Ryan, head of the global health agency’s emergency program.
“We haven’t got full knowledge of the impact,” Ryan said of the Covid surge in China during a press conference in Geneva last week.
Dr. Maria van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid technical manager, said last week that omicron sub-variants BA.5, BQ.1, BF.7 and BA.2.75 are circulating in China. XBB has also been detected in China, one of the most avoidance-resistant variants up to now.
Institute of Metrics and Health Assessment, in a report published on December 15, said an enormous wave of infections in China is inevitable as Beijing relaxes its zero-COVID-19 policy. In response to the report, an enormous number of severe diseases will occur in the elderly population and the number of fatalities might be significant.
China is in a difficult position because domestically developed vaccines are not as effective as Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA injections. Vaccination coverage amongst the elderly population in China also lags behind other countries.
“One in seven people on the planet live in China, and boosting vaccination, protecting the health system during this era, is in the interest of seven out of seven people on the planet,” Ryan said.
The US offered China mRNA Covid vaccines and other support, but Beijing rejected the offer, a federal health official said in a Wednesday’s call.