“It’s an explosive situation.” Imad Kansau, an infectious disease specialist at the Antoine-Bécière de Clamart hospital (Hauts-de-Seine), reacted on BFMTV to the meteoric increase in positive cases of Covid-19 in China and sounded the alarm.
Since the lifting, at the beginning of December, of the drastic sanitary measures put into effect at the beginning of the pandemic, “at least 250 million people have been infected in China,” Christian Bréchot, virologist and president of the Network, stated on our antenna. virus world. “Until recently we were around 660 million since the start of the pandemic globally,” he added.
Figures that are “crashing”, partly due to the spread of an Omicron sub-variant, BF.7. This BA.5 subline became the majority in Beijing at the beginning of the month, according to the specialized site livescience.
A higher reproduction rate?
On December 16, Antoine Flahault, an epidemiologist and director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Geneva, wrote: On twitterthat “BF.7 would have an R0 (virus reproduction rate) of 10 to 18.6. This means that an infected person will transmit the virus, on average, to between 10 and 18.6 other people, against 5.08 in average for Omicron,” citing an article in the Chinese tabloid Global Times.
According to Li Tongzeng, a medical expert at Beijing Xiaotangshan Hospital, included in the article, the symptoms of BF.7 are similar to those of other Omicron subvariants: fever, cough, sore throat or vomiting, diarrhea…
Although early studies tend to affirm that BF.7 is not more virulent than the other Omicron mutations, its high contagiousness is a cause for concern for global health authorities.
The appearance of other mutations?
“A pandemic is a global, global problem. We cannot reason in Franco-French. What is happening in China will inevitably have an impact one way or another on global health,” said Christian Brechot.
“An explosion of cases in a rather dramatic situation can have consequences in the rest of the world, declared the infectologist Imad Kansau, for the rest of the countries it is a breeding ground for viruses that can still give rise to mutants.
In fact, the more the virus circulates, the more new variants or sub-variants with more dangerous characteristics may appear. Therefore, the health risk would not be immediate, especially in France, where the vaccination rate is high.
“Possibly there will be the appearance of more transmissible variants,” Antoine Flahault also warned on our antenna.
But monitoring the evolution of the epidemic in China will be increasingly complicated. Since Sunday, the National Health Commission, equivalent to a ministry, has indicated that it would stop publishing the daily numbers of cases and deaths from Covidas it had been doing since the beginning of the pandemic.
The shutdown of the country’s economy.
The tens of millions of daily cases detected in China could once again slow down the country’s activity and have direct repercussions on the rest of the world, particularly in France with a shortage of materials or even medicines.
For example, on December 24, Rémi Salomon, president of the AP-HP medical commission, recalled in a tweet that “80% of the active principles, the raw material of our medicines, are manufactured in China and India”.
“The wave of Covid currently overwhelming China risks exacerbating our supply difficulties for many medicines,” he wrote, referring to the need to “relocate production”.
Source: BFM TV
