LLast week, when a top Chinese health adviser projected 65 million COVID-19 cases a week in China by June, some health experts dreamed of the alarm.
China has been facing a new wave of COVID-19 driven by the XBB variant since April. The data from Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory disease doctor who was one of the first to confirm the easy transmissibility of COVID-19, provided an unusual glimpse of how the disease may be spreading in China nearly six months after Beijing ended abruptly its draconian zero-COVID strategy.
Since switching to the “living with the virus” policy in early December, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped updating weekly infections. But the sudden relaxation of anti-epidemic protocols also led to an estimated 37 million new infections one day weeks later. In January, experts said they believed nearly 80% of China’s 1.4 billion people it 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 weekly infections by May, rising to 65 million in June. This goes against the estimate by Chinese health officials that the wave peaked in April. In Beijing, the number of new infections registered between May 15 and 21 grew four times in four weeks.
While Zhong said that vaccines targeting this specific variant will be rolled out soon, the projection of new COVID-19 infections nonetheless exhausted markets. China’s herd immunity has always been in question: the refusal to use foreign-sourced mRNA vaccines meant the public was vaccinated against COVID-19 with a shot that proved less effective at preventing infection during early clinical trials. say the researchersand strict virus containment protocols restricted the possibility of developing natural immunity.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells TIME that while only mass testing can detect the true extent of the COVID-19 surge, the population has gained some immunity from the previous wave.
“We shouldn’t worry if China doesn’t worry,” Huang says. “Public health officials are trying to minimize the severity of this second wave. The Chinese people seem to have learned to coexist with the virus. There is that social adaptability.”
Women wearing face masks use exercise equipment in a public park in Beijing in May 2023.
Mark Schiefelbein—AP Photo
Compared to countries like the US and Australia, China has only just begun the transition of COVID-19 from a pandemic to an endemic disease. Catherine Bennett, an epidemiologist at Deakin University in Australia, says the new wave “tests the effectiveness of its vaccines and its boosters,” adding that Beijing needs to make sure everyone’s vaccinations are up to date, especially those of the elderly and the vulnerable population.
Chinese data is a concern
With the virus continuing to circulate in China alongside waning public immunity, there is still a chance that a new, more dangerous sub-variant will emerge, Bennett adds, though the chance is much lower 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 the infections are relatively milder. “It’s somewhat reassuring, therefore, now that we’re a year and a half in with Omicron, that we haven’t seen a major change that has undermined our immunity, our testing capacity, and most importantly, antivirals,” Bennett adds. .
But another factor affecting China’s forecast is its willingness to share information. Independent experts have been skeptical of China’s official COVID-19 figures, forcing many to register their own statistics. A delayed release of China’s marriage and funeral data for the period from October to December 2022 has also sparked speculation that the country has yet to determine the true extent of the infection spread from its first wave.
Vincent Pang, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, says that data on the spread and impact of COVID-19 will only be useful if it is shared with others on a well-regulated global platform, so these countries can conduct your own risk assessment. “Infectious diseases don’t respect geographic boundaries,” he tells TIME. “No one is safe until everyone is ready and safe.”
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