Health experts have warned that rising Covid-19 cases in China as the country eases restrictions could be fertile ground for new variants to emerge.
Beijing announced, this Wednesday, the end of the mandatory quarantines upon arrival in the country, starting on January 8, in the last vestige of the “zero Covid” policy that, for almost three years, has kept China closed to the world. since the pandemic began.
While the Chinese government has stopped publishing the number of daily cases, officials in several cities have estimated that hundreds of thousands of people have been infected, while hospitals and crematoria are overwhelmed across the country.
Now that the virus is circulating freely among nearly a fifth of the world’s population, many countries and experts fear that China is becoming a breeding ground for new variants.
Each new infection increases the chances that the virus will mutate, said Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Geneva.
“The fact that 1.4 billion people are suddenly exposed to SARS-CoV-2 obviously creates favorable conditions for the emergence of variants,” he told Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.
Bruno Lina, a professor of virology at the French University of Lyon, told La Croix newspaper that “given the intense circulation of the virus and therefore the increased risk of mutations, a potential group of viruses could emerge from China.
Soumya Swaminathan, who until November was chief scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), also said that a large part of the Chinese population is vulnerable, partly because many older people have not been vaccinated.
“We need to be aware of any emerging variants of concern,” he told the Indian Express newspaper.
In response to rising cases, Japan, India and the United States will require PCR tests for all passengers coming from China, a move Antoine Flahault says could be a way around any delays in information coming from Beijing.
“If we can sample and sequence all the viruses identified in all travelers to China, we will know almost immediately if new variants emerge and spread” in the country, Flahault said.
Xu Wenbo, head of the virus control institute of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said hospitals across the country will collect samples from patients and enter the sequential information into a new comprehensive database, which will allow authorities to monitor new strains in real time. .
More than 130 new omicron subvariants have been detected in China in the past three months, Xu said last week.
These include XXB and BQ.1, but BA.5.2 and BF.7 remain the main omicron strains detected in China, the Chinese official said.
A “soup” of more than 500 new omicron subvariants has been identified in recent months, Antoine Flahault stressed.
“All the variants, when they are more transmissible than the previously dominant variants -such as BQ.1, B2.75.2, XBB, CH.1 or BF.7- definitely represent threats, because they can cause new outbreaks,” said the epidemiologist. .
“Today, none of these variants appear to present specific new risks of more severe symptoms, but this could happen in the near future,” he added.
Source: TSF
