Beijing: China will log hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 cases in the coming days but the vast majority will recover in seven to 10 days, the country’s leading epidemiologist has said as millions of homebound citizens continued to cope with a sudden spread of infections amid shortage of fever medicines and testing kits on Sunday.
Beijing wore a deserted look on Sunday as residents avoided going out despite most malls, shops and restaurants remaining open following the abrupt withdrawal of Covid curbs including the mandatory nucleic acid tests last week.
Some restaurants, however, had to be shut down because of several staff members catching the infection.
Beijing’s official Covid count reported on Sunday for Saturday was 1,661, a count that belied widespread evidence of a rapidly spreading outbreak across the city of some 22 million residents.
Anecdotal evidence and social media exchanges pointed to the possibility of the actual number of active infections in the city to be much more.
The Chinese mainland reported 2,270 locally transmitted confirmed Covid-19 cases, the national health commission (NHC) said on Sunday, adding that 8,327 local asymptomatic carriers were also identified.
The numbers don’t add up given that mass testing requirements have been dropped and citizens are being encouraged by the government to self-test. The message: No need to report positive infections if there’s no requirement for hospitalisation.
Speaking to the media in the southern city of Guangzhou over the weekend, Zhong Nanshan, China’s top respiratory expert, admitted that “only a few thousands (positive infections) have been truly diagnosed” and “we see that hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people infected in several cities”.
“One infected person can spread it (the infection) to 18 others,” Zhong added.
“The Omicron variant currently circulating in China is more transmissible, but a majority of infected people can fully recover within a week,” Zhong was quoted as saying by CGTN during a virtual meeting of the Annual Congress of Chinese Thoracic Society.
“Ninety-nine percent of those infected can recover in 7 to 10 days, and having a good rest is conducive to the recovery,” he added, according to the CGTN report.
Zhong added that the vaccination rate of the whole population needs to be increased, particularly among the elderly. “Research has shown that the Omicron variant has continuously enhanced transmissibility but with a continuously declined mortality rate,” Zhong said.
“The infections of Omicron mutants, including BA.5 and BF.7, were nothing scary, and most infected people could completely recover in seven to 10 days,” he said.
“About 3.45 billion vaccine jabs had been administered by December 7, 2022, and more than 228 million people above 60 had been given full inoculation by November 28,” official news agency Xinhua said in a report.
