Mallika Dureja
The head of the World Health Organization said on Wednesday that the organisation is “concerned about the risk to life in China” because of the rapid spread of the coronavirus across the country and the Chinese government’s lack of information about the outbreak.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the organisation recently met with Chinese officials to stress how important it is to share more information about Covid-19 issues, such as hospitalisation rates and genetic sequences, even though the pandemic is still getting smaller around the world since it started in late 2019.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said that China is “under-representing” the severity of its current Covid-19 outbreak. pic.twitter.com/1D9d1Pftik
— South China Morning Post (@SCMPNews) January 5, 2023
At a press briefing, Tedros said, “Data are still essential for WHO to do regular, quick, and strong risk assessments of the world situation.”
Tedros said he understood why many countries have recently taken steps to stop their citizens from travelling to China. He said, “It’s understandable that some countries are taking steps to stop their citizens” because not much is known about Covid-19.
How other countries test:
Dr. Michael Ryan, who is in charge of emergencies at the WHO, said that the testing rules that some countries have in place do not stop people from travelling.
“We think that some countries’ restrictions on China’s entry are not based on science, and some countries’ practises that go too far are even worse,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a briefing on Tuesday.
Continuing concerns:
Ryan from the WHO also said that there are still concerns about how Chinese officials are recording coronavirus deaths. He said that their definition, which only counts Covid-19 deaths if there is a record of respiratory failure, is too narrow.
Even though there were many thousands of cases every day and reports of hospitals, fever clinics, and crematoriums being full, China only had 13 official Covid-19 deaths in December.
Based on information shared by the Chinese government, such as genetic sequences that have been put into a public database, a WHO expert group said on Wednesday that no new dangerous Covid variants have been found in China.
The WHO said that Chinese scientists have now shared more than 770 sequences. More than 97% of all local infections are caused by omicron subvariants BA.5 and their offspring. About 68% of all sequences in the world are BA.5 variants.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said that it didn’t think the increase in Covid-19 in China would affect the outbreak in Europe because so many people in Europe had been vaccinated.
It also said that the variants that were spreading in China were already in Europe, which suggests that any spread from China wouldn’t make much of a difference.
The WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, Maria Van Kerkhove, said that the organisation was currently figuring out how important the XBB.1.5 variant is, which is showing up in more and more cases in the US.
Van Kerkhove said, “Our worry is how easy it is to spread.” “The more this virus spreads, the more likely it is to change,” she said, adding that more waves of transmission don’t have to mean more deaths because there are so many vaccines and medicines available.
Van Kerkhove said that there isn’t enough evidence yet to show that XBB.1.5 makes diseases worse, but that the WHO is working on a new risk assessment of the variant that should be out soon.
“It’s not too much based on how each country evaluates its own risk,” Ryan said.
He said that China has had some of the strictest rules in the world about Covid-19 for the past three years. “The reality for China is that many countries now feel they don’t have enough information on which to base their risk assessment,” he said.
This week, Chinese officials were very angry about the Covid-19 tests that visitors from China had to take. They also threatened to take action against the countries involved, which include the US and several European countries.
