 "China gripped by 1st of three predicted COVID waves as a million projected to die in 2023")
Beijing: Covid has made a comeback in China and this time it is more severe. Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy has failed to restrict the spread of the deadly virus which allegedly originated from a lab in Wuhan.
However, people in the Asian nation will have to spend this winter and Lunar New Year indoors with country’s chief epidemiologist warning that China is in the first of an expected three waves of Covid cases this winter.
The country on Monday (19 December) reported its first Covid-related death after the country on 7 December abruptly ended most restrictions under its stringent anti-virus protocols.
Wu Zunyou of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said that the current Covid-19 outbreak in China would peak this winter and run in three waves for about three months.
Speaking at a conference in Beijing, Zunyou said the first wave that has begun in mid-December would run through mid-January, mostly in cities. The second wave would begin from late January to mid-February next year, and is likely to be triggered by movement of people ahead of week-long Lunar Year holiday that starts from 21 January.
A third wave of Covid in China is expected to be between late February and mid-March when people are expected to return to work after the holiday.
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View AllA million Covid deaths in China in 2023
Modelling by the US-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) suggests the China could witness an explosion of Covid cases and over a million people in the country could die in 2023, with fatalities peaking around 5,000 per day in April.
Zunyou warned that the vulnerable should be protected and recommended that the general public should get themselves inoculated with booster vaccines.
On Sunday, China reported 2,097 new cases of Covid-19.
In Beijing, the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant has already hit services. Funeral homes and crematoriums across the city of 22 million are also struggling to keep up with demand amid staff shortages as workers and drivers call in sick.
Zunyou said if the strict containment policies were lifted a year earlier, some 250,000 people in China would have died.
Is China’s population vaccinated against Covid?
China says that more than 90 per cent of its population has been fully vaccinated. However, less than half of people aged 80 and over have received three doses of vaccine.
Elderly people and those with comorbidities are more likely to suffer severe Covid symptoms.
Notably, China has developed and produced its own vaccines, which have been shown to be less effective at protecting people against serious Covid illness and death than the mRNA vaccines used in much of the rest of the world.
With inputs from agencies
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