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The Draconian zero Covid-19 policy of China has started to ease in recent weeks. In the wake of the protests that have broken out in many cities, the authorities have begun to abandon some of the toughest and most controversial measures, such as the obligation to isolation for positive and close contacts in special structuresthe need to show a test negative to get access to shops, offices and means Of transportand the possibility of resorting to some extreme forms of lockdown seen in the past few years. The change of policy, and even more perhaps the cold season and the arrival of an incredibly infectious variant like omicron, are destined to push up the number of new infections. And for a country that has not yet learned to live with this pandemic, the coming months could prove to be complicated. For this, during his last briefing annual WHO has reiterated the need to collect and share data on the epidemiological situation of the country. Since there are no suspects that the institutions are covering up the true extent of the Covid wave that is hitting the country.
A narrative different from reality
In fact, looking at i official data arriving from China the situation does not seem particularly critical: a few thousand new infections daily, and practically no deaths (according to the WHO, in the last 24 hours there are around fifty). the concern, at least for many western media, is that the official data do not give a realistic picture of what is happening in the country. Reuters speak for example of an eyewitness, which reportedly saw around 40 hearses waiting in front of a Beijing crematorium. The possible indicator of a much more ferocious impact of the pandemic than officially described.
Furthermore, the Chinese government has recently changed the definition of death caused by Covid-19limiting it to people who died for pneumonia and insufficiency respiratory in the presence of a swab positive. In this way, the number of deaths is certainly destined to be much lower than what is seen in many other parts of the world, where the ability of the virus to cause thrombi, heart attacks, septicemiaand many others symptoms potentially lethal. Even so, it’s hard to imagine the death toll sitting at zero for days, if indeed the virus is racing wildly through the country.
What’s really going on in China, then?
Impossible to say, at least for now. Commenting on the situation, WHO experts stressed that the growth of infections is expected and inevitablenot so much for the abandonment of the zero covid policy of the country (which in fact now simply resembles the one adopted for years in the rest of the world), but rather because of the infectious capacity from the variant Omicron. Impossible to rein in with public health measures and restrictions alone. And against which the only truly effective weapon remains the vaccination of the groups at risk of the population, an aspect that China is trying to improve in recent weeks (although coverage is relatively high in the country, there are still many frail elderly people who have not completed the vaccination cycle correctly).
According to WHO’s Director of Health Emergencies Programme, Michael Ryanin China we are probably seeing what we have seen almost everywhere during this pandemic: the difficulty of keeping up with the real numbers Of contagion, hospitalizations and deaths, which are almost always intercepted with some delay by health institutions. “What we see in China at the moment is a relatively low number of cases reported in hospitals and intensive care units, but on an anecdotal level there is evidence that those intensive care units are filling up”, he explained during the briefing on December 21st. “It may be that the official data lags behind the real situation. In a fast-moving wave you may have reported three days ago that your hospital is fine, and this morning that may not be the case. I wouldn’t say that China is actively avoiding telling us what’s going on, I think they are as lagging behind the epidemiological curve as anyone else in a similar situation has been. What is needed is a better way to collect this data quickly, so as to monitor the situation together”.
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