Experts weigh in on the dangerous coronavirus situation in China | DW News

China is recovering from a wave of Covid-19 infections, hospitals are overwhelmed with

coronavirus

cases now that the country abandoned its long-held strict zero-concealment policies, medical authorities say the current wave will only get worse See you next week for those who are still healthy. The rule is to stay out of the way of others. It may only take a month from start to finish for that to happen, with 60, 70, even 80 people infected, so we know the general timeline and there is a narrow window of opportunity to take action now. that would save people's lives Ruby Huang from National Taiwan University is monitoring things in China I asked her to describe the

situation

Hello, yes, the certain 180 degree turn in the Kobe zero policy and the rapid wave of spread of Kovitz have apparently revealed fragile health.

China's care system and the lack of implementation of the vaccination campaign for vulnerable populations such as the elderly, so we are seeing the infrastructure search capacity in China become saturated very quickly with newly diagnosed cases, each Today, hospital beds are overloaded, medications are in short supply, and this has actually spread to places like Singapore and Taiwan, where over-the-counter flu medications are being taken out and sent to China to help. to friends and family, none of this is a surprise considering the covert zero policy is already over, so how prepared was China for this? Yes, it tried to be the last, last major country to eat, to hold on to a tough Zero Tolerance policy toward greed, but China probably overlooked the reason why any country maintains a tough containment policy. towards any pandemic, which is to buy enough time for other types of preparedness to be implemented, such as vaccines and medicines, so we are seeing that the Chinese government has failed to implement a broader preparedness program, a plan in terms of how to cover the majority of the population with more effective vaccines, such as mRNA technology, and also to stockpile antiviral medications and even essential medications such as flu for fever, so we see that there is a lack of communication in the public domain to really educate. to the elderly to encourage them to come get vaccinated and we see that the elderly population is the most vulnerable group to this new wave of greed.

Just briefly, do you see China overtaking itself in the near term in this global impact because first? of the entire supply chain will probably be disrupted if a large part of the workforce is sidelined due to covid, so we think probably the first thing they could do is accelerate their vaccination campaign now and probably be more tolerable, um , welcoming other foreign vaccines, such as vaccines with mRNA technology, we know that they are now opening up for foreign expats in China to receive the MRI vaccines, whether or not they consider administering the same vaccine that has been proven to be effective. more effective than your own vaccine for your own population, we hope you will consider this.

Thank you very much for your analysis. Professor Ruby Huang in Taipei spoke earlier with Maximilian Gatella, he is an epidemiologist at Charlotte Hospital here in Berlin. I asked him how worried he was. it's about the pandemic reports coming out of China, yes, you know, we see, as you said in the report, 1.5 billion people very under-vaccinated or even naïve to the virus. We see that most public health measures to contain the spread have been lifted and the holiday. season with dozens or hundreds of millions of Chinese traveling in the coming weeks, this is really worrying. Yes, if countries outside of China were worried about potential fallout as the virus ravages the country's huge population, travel bans would make sense.

What is so worrying right now is the lack of immunization or the low level of vaccination in the Chinese population for countries that receive travelers from China. Its prognosis depends largely on the level of immunization in this new population. I wouldn't expect major spillover effects in those countries where you're talking about immunization there with access to more and different vaccines making a difference for the population of China right now and we've seen in many studies that the best immunization is based on receiving different vaccines that have a heterologous immunization status and this is what is missing in the Chinese population, so the vaccination activities in recent months would of course have been an important advantage now, but now there is very little time to change . through new vaccination campaigns Maximilian Gatler, epidemiologist at the Uhite Hospital in Berlin.

Thank you so much. Ruby Huang joins us from the National Taiwan University College of Medicine. She has been monitoring things in China. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. A new report from the Bloomberg

news

agency that Chinese health officials believe nearly 37 million people may have been infected in a single day this week sounds like a shocking figure, but does it seem plausible to you? Yes, I think it is a lot. of numbers, but the problem with the data that comes from China is that we are not sure if it is accurate, but let me give you some estimates like, for example, in Taiwan, we have 23 million people, now we are seeing 20,000 cases a day . of infection and if you do the math, China has 60 tons of population, so we should probably have 1.2 million new cases every day;

However, the vaccines the Chinese are using are not as effective as the ones we have been using in many other places, so you will probably need to multiply. You already know the ineffectiveness of protecting new infection, so probably 37 million per day is a bit of an exaggeration. I hope that is not true. I'm thinking you know the above like five or five six million per day is probably about the right number that we should see, but again, this is a very difficult time for the Chinese authorities to present accurate data that they can even hand it over to who you mentioned .

Those vaccines are obviously one piece of the puzzle. How prepared do you think China was for this increase in cases? I don't think they are prepared and I don't think they have enough communications to the public about how to deal with this next wave. I think the U-turns in the south Uh, and the record spread of the virus is a shock to everyone and has revealed a tremendously challenging time for the fragile health system, so I think what needs to be moved forward is to accelerate the vaccination, especially among the elderly and vulnerable so far. Only 40 percent of people over 80 in China have received at least one booster dose, meaning three vaccines, and this is not enough.

Second, it alleviates the burden of front-line healthcare as much as possible, which is to triage severe cases, away from mild cases, encourage people to stay home for those low-risk patients and you you know they have very good public application systems, they probably use the application system to teach the public, you know under what circumstances they can stay home and rest. recover and come to the healthcare facility only for vulnerable people with comorbidities. Ruby Huang of National Taiwan University. Thank you very much for sharing that knowledge with us.