People receive an inhaled COVID-19 vaccine at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Bijie, Guizhou province, China, December 29, 2022.
CFOTO | Future publication | Getty Images
US and global health leaders say Beijing is not sharing enough information about the spread of Covid-19 in China, leaving the international community in the dark about the magnitude and severity of the current wave of infection in the world’s most populous country.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement Wednesday that the lack of transparency from China could delay the identification of new Covid variants that threaten public health. According to the CDC, China shares very few genomic sequences used to identify such variants.
The CDC on Wednesday announced new testing requirements for airline passengers whose journeys depart from China. All passengers, regardless of nationality or vaccination status, must get tested for Covid no later than two days before their flight to the US and submit a negative result to the airline before departure. The requirements go into effect January 5.
India, Italy, Japan and Taiwan have also imposed Covid testing requirements on air passengers from China. The Chinese government is battling a flurry of infections after easing its strict zero-Covid policy in the wake of social unrest earlier this year.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, a US federal health official said the Biden administration has very limited information on the number of new Covid cases, hospitalizations and particularly deaths in China. Gut testing and reporting has also declined in the country, making the true infection rate difficult to determine, the official said.
China’s zero-Covid policy, which sought to suppress outbreaks through strict measures, means that much of the population has no immunity whatsoever to the highly transmissible Omicron variants, the official said. As a result, the Biden administration predicts that a large number of people will become infected in China relatively quickly.
“What we are concerned about is a new variant that may actually emerge in China,” said the official, who declined to be named as a condition of the press interview. “With so many people in China being affected in a short period of time, there’s a chance, a likelihood that a new variant will emerge.”
According to a statement this week from GISAID, a public database in Germany, the latest genomic sequencing data shared by health authorities in China indicates that the Covid variants circulating in the country are similar to those in the rest of the world.
In the past 180 days, China has sequenced and shared 412 Covid cases with GISAID, compared to more than 576,000 shared by US health authorities China has shared less than 1% of reported and sequenced Covid cases, while the US has shared more than 4 % and the UK almost 12%.
The World Health Organization has also called on China to share more information about what is happening on the ground as the virus spreads.
“WHO is deeply concerned about the changing situation in China with increasing reports of serious illnesses,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the global health agency, at a press conference in Geneva last week.
“To make a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation on the ground, WHO needs more detailed information on disease severity, hospitalizations and ICU support requirements,” Tedros said.
WHO has largely anecdotal reports on emergency departments and in some cases intensive care units in China, according to Dr. Mike Ryan, head of the emergency program of the global health organization.
“We don’t have full knowledge of the impact,” Ryan said at the press conference in Geneva on China’s Covid wave last week.
Dr. Maria van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid technical chief, said last week that the omicron subvariants BA.5, BQ.1, BF.7 and BA.2.75 are all circulating in China. XBB has also been discovered in China, which is one of the most immune-evasive variants to date.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said in a report published Dec. 15 that a massive wave of infection in China is inevitable as Beijing relaxes its zero-Covid policy. According to the report, there will be huge numbers of serious illnesses among the elderly population and the death toll will be significant.
China faces a difficult situation because its domestically developed vaccines are not as effective as Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA injections. The vaccination rate among the elderly in China also lags behind that of other countries.
“One in seven people on the planet lives in China and the acceleration of vaccination, the protection of the health system during this period, is in the interest of seven out of seven people on this planet,” Ryan said.
The US has offered China mRNA Covid vaccines and other support, but Beijing has rejected the offer, the federal health official said on Wednesday’s call.
