Following protests China lifted some of its zero COVID restrictions this month. There has already been a spike in cases ahead of the country’s Lunar New Year holiday.
One expert told WWL’s Newell Normand this week that the move has the potential to set China – and the world – back.
COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China, and began spreading rapidly worldwide in early 2020. Early stages of the pandemic were marked by lockdown measures around the globe, as well as high case loads and deaths.
Dr. Joseph Kanter, State Health Officer at the Louisiana Department of Health, said the situation brewing in China could set the country “right back to the beginning.”
“China had maintained this COVID zero policy… and they put all their eggs in that basket,” he explained. “They did not invest nearly anything into therapeutics and they invested minimally into vaccines.”
According to the World Health Organization, more than 3 billion vaccine doses have been administered in China, which has a population of around 1.4 billion people. However, some of the most common vaccines there have less than 80% efficacy, much lower than the vaccines offered in the U.S., said a report this month from Slate.
Kanter also said that this issue, coupled with the fact that not many people in China have gotten COVID due to their zero COVID policy, has left their population highly vulnerable to infection.
“With China changing their policy, any concerns about whether or not there’s going to be the creation of a new subvariant that flows out of that?” Normand asked Kanter.
When there is an outbreak of COVID-19 anywhere in the world, it creates a risk of new variants popping up, “like an incubation chamber for new variants,” said Kanter. For example, the delta variant spread stemming from an Indian outbreak.
However, Kanter said China is expected to allow COVID to spread.
“It sounds like they’re just going to let it rip and hope for the best,” he told Normand. “I do have concerns that that’s going to affect us,” Kanter added.
He said that, even if China alone is overwhelmed with COVID cases, it would likely cause economic and supply chain issues throughout the world, including the U.S. Kanter added that Chinese hospitals are expected to be ill equipped to deal with a surge in cases and he is concerned about deaths in China.
New projections from the U.S.-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) indicated that cases in China would peak around April 1 with around a third of the country infected and 322,000 new deaths, according to a Saturday Reuters report.
“We’re probably never going to know the real origin of the virus,” Kanter said.
Going forward, he said that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still have less “robust” communication with China than before the pandemic.
“We’re probably never going to know the real origin of the virus,” since China won’t likely provide access to data about the early stages of the outbreak, Kanter said.
One positive bit of data is that the variants in China now seem to be similar to others in transmission around the world.
“We’re going to have to watch it really closely,” said Kanter. He also said it would be “premature” for the WHO to end the global pandemic warning now as the China policy is poised to change transmission of the virus.
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