China foresees a new wave of Covid with 65 million weekly cases

“The threat of Covid has not disappeared, even if the world does not want to hear about it, governments must be prepared to respond to a resurgence of infections,” says WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, who led the strategy of the World Health Organization during the crisis. And it is that a new alarm signal has arrived from Beijing, although contained.

The omicron XBB variant, which has become prevalent in China, is causing 40 million infections a week and will peak at the end of June with 65 million cases a week, says Professor Zhong Nanshan, the most respected expert of the Chinese government on respiratory diseases.

The situation is less serious than last January, when after the sudden withdrawal of the Chinese government from the Covid Zero policy, with its suffocating blockades for the economy and society, there was an explosion of cases. Then there were 37 million infections a day and an unknown number of deaths (mathematical models developed in the West assumed about a million deaths in three critical months, from late December to March).. If the 65 million weekly cases expected by the end of June are reached, it will be about 9 million a day, less than a quarter of the first wave.

This second peak will not pose a serious collapse problem for Chinese hospitals, according to Dr.. Wang Guangfa, a specialist at Peking University Hospital. The first wave last winter affected about 80% of the population of large cities, causing an immunization phenomenon that is fading six months later. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing stopped providing weekly statistical bulletins on the number of Covid-19 infections since early May, but has noted that in China the XBB variant has gone from accounting for 0.2% of the Covid cases in February to 83.6% today.

The doctor. Wang Guangfa reassures the population: “Reinfection usually causes milder symptoms”. In addition, the Chinese pharmaceutical industry has developed two new vaccines targeting the new variant, and the government is preparing to make them available to the public as soon as possible.

Epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan has announced that the authorities will soon approve three or four more vaccines: “We are very advanced in research and development”. The doctor. WHO's Van Kerkhove calls on governments and the public to maintain a reasonable level of precaution and urges the international community to work together to prevent a threatening return of Covid-19.

However, the World Health Organization has rejected for the umpteenth time Taiwan's request to participate for 10 days in the annual assembly, which has been held since May 21 in Geneva.. The veto has been won again by China, which does not want any international recognition for the island, which it considers a temporary and illegitimately separated province and to be reunified.

Politics once again prevailed over global health, said the Taipei Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recalling that the democratic island's health system had reacted well to the pandemic and could have shared its experience at the WHO meeting, in who asked to participate as a mere “observer”.