Some health professionals raised the alarm last week when a Chinese top health consultant predicted that by June, China would see 65 million COVID-19 cases every week.
Since April, China has been dealing with a fresh COVID-19 wave that is fed by the XBB variety. Nearly six months after Beijing unexpectedly abandoned its harsh zero-COVID approach, data from Zhong Nanshan—a respiratory illness specialist who was among the first to identify COVID-19’s simple transmissibility—provided a unique glimpse into how the disease may be spreading in China.
The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention ceased updating weekly infections after switching to a “living with the virus” policy in early December. But weeks later, an estimated 37 million additional infections a day were also a result of the abrupt relaxation of anti-epidemic tactics. Nearly 80% of China’s 1.4 billion people, according to specialists, had already had the disease in this initial wave by January.
Zhong’s modelling showed that the XBB variation is anticipated to generate 40 million infections weekly by May, increasing to 65 million in June during the second wave since April. According to Chinese health experts, the wave peaked in April, thus this goes against their estimation. Between May 15 and May 21, there were four times as many new illnesses in Beijing.
Despite Zhong’s assurance that vaccinations for this specific variety will soon be available, the expectation of further COVID-19 infections agitated the marketplace. China’s communal immunity has never been fully established because of an unwillingness to employ foreign-sourced mRNA vaccines, which resulted in the public receiving an injection against COVID-19 that, according to early clinical studies, was less effective at preventing infection.
Although only mass testing can determine the exact scope of the COVID-19 spike, Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells TIME that the public has developed some protection from the last wave.
