“Should we be worried about the development of the pandemic in China?”, asks Professor Ilias Mosialos, beginning his post on Facebook, while and Europe has sounded the alarm about the developments in the Asian country.
In particular, in his post, Ilias Mosialos states:
Should we be concerned with the development of the pandemic in China?
The short answer is “No”.
Although there is not much information about the variants of the coronavirus circulating in China, they do not appear to be different from those already identified in Europe and other regions of the world.
Some experts worry that a new, very dangerous variant may emerge due to the rapid spread of the virus among large numbers of people. They are not wrong. This has happened several times in the last three years; one or more variants may arise with this mass dispersal.
What might make sense to explain is that this time the new variant will arise in a population that has not been exposed to the virus much. But this does not necessarily mean for us that this variant will manage to escape from the current existing possibility of immunoprotection.
It may have the potential for widespread spread in China to populations vaccinated with Chinese vaccines that are not very effective. But if there is a spread to other countries (which is certain), the new variant will hit populations vaccinated with multiple doses of vaccines, but also populations that have already been repeatedly exposed to a cocktail of virus variants.
But there will be some who will say that the virus will circulate freely in immunocompromised populations in China, and therefore there will be a lot of potential for mutations. This thought is correct, but the virus has not stopped circulating. In fact, it circulates quite a lot, both outside China, and in immunocompromised populations.
What I mean; Let’s look at the numbers.
In the last week alone, we averaged 564,000 cases per day outside of China. That is, in one month we had over 15 million cases.
And we also have the example of another huge country to learn from, India, where the pandemic is at very low levels. But we all remember in the spring of 2021, the pandemic reached explosive proportions in India, and the health system, which is much worse compared to that of China, almost completely collapsed. Nevertheless, India persevered, promoted an adequate vaccination program and public health protection measures, and now faces no serious problems. Of course, the population of India is younger compared to that of China, but we are still talking about the two countries with the largest number of inhabitants on the planet.
China made a huge mistake by implementing the zero tolerance policy on covid disease. As I have pointed out in the past, at the beginning of a pandemic we take difficult containment measures until we equip the health system and acquire the necessary pharmaceutical measures (i.e. adequacy of treatments, drugs and vaccines). Then, and once the vulnerable have been protected, we update and gradually reduce the measures, and correspondingly, we gradually learn to live with the virus.
The virus is not going to go away, it will continue to change and for that we need new, more effective vaccines and better drugs. More research and investment effort is needed for new treatments because several are either no longer very effective or have significant interactions with other drugs and great care is needed when administered to certain categories of patients.
The pandemic started in China, but it is not likely that we will have another major pandemic wave internationally, due to the developments in China.
In conclusion, we should not worry too much about developments in China. China will face big problems in the coming months. But it is an organized country with a relatively good health system, especially at the hospital level. Primary health care is inferior because the Chinese only trust the big hospitals. They will be forced to import effective vaccines (wealthy Chinese already go to Macau to make mRNA vaccines) and will unfortunately suffer heavy losses, especially in the older population.
Source: News Beast
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
