Chinese health officials are in a hurry to find new mutant COVID strains because more than a third of the Omicron variants found in the huge wave of infections that has hit the country has led to bigger outbreaks.
In the last three months, China has found more than 130 sublineages of Omicron. One of these is BF.7, a variant that is very good at avoiding the immune system and is thought to be the cause of the recent rise in infections.
The head of China’s National Institute for the Control and Prevention of Viral Diseases, Xu Wenbo, said last week that China plans to track the virus at three city hospitals in each province. There, samples will be taken from sick people who walk in and people who die.
Wenbo confirmed that 50 of the 130 versions of Omicron that had been found in China had caused outbreaks.
He said the country is working on making a national genetic database to track how each strain changes over time and study how each change might affect public health. Every new infection gives the virus a unique chance to change. COVID spread quickly in China, and in the first 20 days of December, as many as 248 million people got sick with it. That’s almost 18% of China’s population.
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The country of 1.4 billion people has completely changed its “zero COVID” policy. This happened at the beginning of the month. The sudden policy change has led to China’s biggest COVID outbreak since the pandemic began. Hospitals are so full that they have to turn away ambulances and can’t treat some very sick people.
We thank friends around the world for expressing optimism that China will put the #COVID situation behind it. Meanwhile, we are determined that those who discredit China's efforts and wish China ill do not get their way.
— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) December 29, 2022
On Dec. 20, about 37 million people in China may have caught COVID-19.
Even though the number of people vaccinated is high, fewer people, especially older people, get a booster. Many people got the shot more than a year ago, so their immunity has decreased.
China has shifted the focus of its response from stemming infection to caring for health and preventing severe cases. This shift is science-based, timely and necessary. pic.twitter.com/EgSIPQQRMb
— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) December 29, 2022
Experts say that a population with some immunity, like China’s, probably makes the virus change and makes new strains. An expert on infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University named Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray compared the virus to a boxer who “learns to avoid your skills and adapts to get around them.”
“When we’ve seen big waves of infection, it’s often followed by new variants,” Ray said.
It’s not clear if a new variant will make people sicker and sicker if they get it, especially in China where there is a massive wave of infections.
Keep following our website Nog Magazine.com for more updates.