China Might Have 65 Million COVID Cases a Week by June. How Worried Should the World Be? [View all]

[riversedge]

Source: time




Commuters wearing face masks make their way along a street in the central business district during the morning rush hour in Beijing. (Mark Schiefelbein—AP Photo)

By Chad de Guzman May 29, 2023 3:18 AM EDT

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China has been facing a new COVID-19 wave fueled by the XBB variant since April. Data from Zhong Nanshan—a respiratory disease doctor who was among the first to confirm COVID-19’s easy transmissibility—provided a rare insight into how the disease could possibly be spreading in China almost six months after Beijing abruptly ended its draconian zero-COVID strategy.


Since pivoting to “living with the virus” policy from early December, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention stopped updating weekly infections. But the sudden relaxation of anti-epidemic protocols also led to an estimated 37 million new infections a day weeks later. By January, experts said they believed almost 80% of China’s 1.4 billion population had already been infected in this first wave.

For the second wave since April, Zhong’s modeling revealed that the XBB variant is expected to cause 40 million infections weekly by May, going up to 65 million in June. This goes against the grain of Chinese health officials’ estimate that the wave had peaked in April. In Beijing, the number of new infections recorded between May 15 and 21 grew four times in four weeks.

Chinese data a concern

With the virus continuing to circulate in China coupled with a waning public immunity, the possibility of a new, more dangerous sub-variant emerging still exists, Bennett adds, although the likelihood is much smaller now. The latest mutations in the genetic makeup of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have not been significantly different from the last major variant, Omicron, and the symptoms of infections are relatively milder. “It’s somewhat reassuring, thus, now a year and a half into Omicron, that we haven’t seen a major shift that’s either undermined our immunity, our testing capability, and importantly, antivirals,” Bennett adds..................

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Read more: https://time.com/6283257/china-xbb-covid-outbreak/

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Well, it seems this new variant is less of a concern here in the US. Yet, we have soo so so many unvaccinated --and the Trumpsters never take the jab. I stay away from large crowds.

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