Know Why China's Latest Covid Situation Has Sparked Global Panic

A massive surge in Covid cases in China has triggered concerns around countries globally over a lack of data transparency regarding the outbreak.

Globally, authorities are imposing or considering curbs on travellers from China as the cases have spread.

China has been hit with a massive surge in Covid cases after the Chinese authorities eased the zero-Covid-policy last month. This has triggered concerns around countries globally over a lack of data and transparency regarding China's outbreak. 

Globally, authorities are imposing or considering curbs on travellers from China as the cases have spread. The United States will impose mandatory Covid-19 tests on travellers from China beginning on January 5, according to a Reuters report. The UK will require a pre-departure negative COVID-19 test for passengers from China as of Jan. 5, the Department of Health said on Friday.

Other countries are also upping their measures.

Know why countries have raised alarm

Flawed data

Beijing has accepted that the scale of the outbreak has become ‘impossible’ to track following the end of mandatory mass testing last month, according to the news agency AFP report.

Even the National Health Commission stopped reporting daily nationwide infection and death statistics. The task has now been given to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which will also publish numbers once a month after China downgrades its management protocols for the disease on January 8, as per the report.

So far, only 15 Covid deaths have been reported since it started to ease restrictions on December 7, after which it narrowed the criteria for recording deaths from the virus. This has fueled concerns that the wave of infections is not being accurately reflected in official statistics. 

Piecemeal estimates

As the government stopped tracking Covid numbers Last month, a few local and regional authorities started estimating daily infection totals as the scale of the outbreak remained unclear.

Health officials in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang suggested that one million residents were being infected every day last week. The cities of Quzhou and Zhoushan noted that at least 30 percent of the population was infected.

The eastern coastal city of Qingdao also capped the number at around 500,000 new daily cases and the southern manufacturing centre of Dongguan estimated up to 300,000. While officials in the island province of Hainan estimated on Friday that the infection rate had crossed 50 percent.

But top health official Wu Zunyou on Thursday said the peak had passed in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Tianjin, with Guangdong province, the country's most populous also maintaining the same stance on Sunday.

Going by the leaked notes of a meeting between health officials last month, around 250 million people had been infected across China in the first 20 days of December.

Fear of new variants

Many countries have resorted to stricter measures of screening Chinese arrivals over concerns about potential new variants. As of now, no evidence of new strains has emerged from the current wave, as per the AFP report.

Top CDC official Xu Wenbo last month revealed that China was creating a national genetic database of Covid samples derived from hospital surveillance aimed at tracking mutations.

Chinese health experts recently noted that the Omicron subvariants BA.5.2 and BF.7 are most prevalent in Beijing, in response to public fears that the Delta variant may still be circulating. Experts noted that Omicron also remained the most dominant strain in Shanghai.

In many Western nations, these strains have been replaced by the more transmissible subvariants XBB and BQ, which are still not dominant in China. Beijing has submitted 384 Omicron samples last month to the global online database GISAID, according to its website. However, the total number of submissions to the database, at 1,308, is dwarfed by those of other nations, including the United States, Britain, Cambodia and Senegal.

Recent samples from China "all closely resemble known globally circulating variants seen... between July and December", GISAID said on Friday.

University of Hong Kong virologist Jin Dong-yan in a podcast last month said people need not fear the risk of a deadlier new variant in China.