The COVID-19 pandemic is coming full circle as the virus wreaks further havoc in the country where it seems to have begun–China. What complicates the situation further is Beijing’s unreliable information on the situation.
China’s National Health Commission, the country’s top health regulator, announced on Sunday that it will no longer publish daily COVID surveillance data, which was already widely regarded as underestimating the illness’s explosive spread following Beijing’s abrupt abandonment of its COVID Zero policy earlier this month.
The day after, the government announced that the mainland China “reported no new COVID-19 deaths” for six days in a row.
Despite the accuracy of the information, COVID cases in China have been on the rise after the country made its swift decision to ease some pandemic restrictions, less than a week after residents in major cities across the country took to the streets to protest the country’s failing COVID policy.
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The fallout is graver on the ground. Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, said that the new surge in mainland could lead to a new subvariant of the virus.
“China has a population that is very large and there’s limited immunity. And that seems to be the setting in which we may see an explosion of a new variant,” said Dr. Ray.
According to experts, a partially immune population like China puts extra pressure on the virus to evolve. “Much of the mildness we’ve experienced over the past six to 12 months in many parts of the world has been due to accumulated immunity either through vaccination or infection, not because the virus has changed in severity,” Dr. Ray added.
The majority of people in China have never been exposed to the coronavirus. The country’s vaccines use an outdated technology that generates less antibodies than messenger RNA vaccines.
The eastern manufacturing and technology hub Zhejiang province estimates that it currently records 1 million COVID cases every day. This amount could potentially quadruple in two weeks before moderating later in January, according to local officials at a press conference on Sunday.
The central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, dubbed “iPhone city” because it is a significant manufacturing base for Apple Inc., forecasts a high in mid-January. According to local reports, nearby Shangdong and Hubei provinces are also expecting a spike around the same time.
The resurgence of the virus in the country is putting a heavy strain on China’s medical capacity. According to a weekend article by Chinese business news portal Caijing, under-resourced regional hospitals have little expertise dealing with the sickness and are already battling with low supply of fever-reducing drugs and other basic therapies.
According to the Beijing Youth Daily, a crematory in Beijing’s Tongzhou District has established a limit on non-residents’ bodies. In a notice issued by the crematory, it is now required to “maintain cremation equipment” and takes a limit of 20 remains daily from people who do not have district resident certificates and died in hospitals outside of the district.
“In the past, the daily workload [of the Tongzhou Crematory] was about 40 bodies. Employees must now work overtime to cremate 140 to 150 bodies every day,” the state-run media reported, adding that the crematory is short-staffed because some of its employees have COVID.
Ms. Liu, a staffer at Tongzhou Crematory, told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times in an earlier interview that the cremation waiting time was seven days and that the farewell ceremony had been canceled.
Other Beijing funeral facilities and crematoriums have allegedly been highly busy since mid-December, with cremation waiting times ranging from five to eleven days.
The country’s health agency, however, seems to have made a turnabout on its policy of not disclosing COVID data, clarifying that it will continue to release statistics and updates on the pandemic.
Information for this briefing was found via Bloomberg, The Epoch Times, CTV News, and the sources mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to this organization. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
