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According to brand-new predictions from the US-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, China’s rapid removal of severe COVID-19 restrictions might lead to a spike in cases and over a million deaths by 2023. (IHME).
According to the organisation, the number of cases in China will peak around April 1, when death would reach 322,000. IHME Director Christopher Murray estimates that by that time, a third of China’s population will be affected.
No confirmed COVID deaths have been recorded by China’s national health authorities since the COVID restrictions were abolished. There were no additional fatalities that were confirmed on December 3.
5,235 people have perished worldwide due to the pandemic.
After unprecedented public protests, China lifted some of the world’s strictest COVID restrictions in December. As a result, the country’s 1.4 billion people are now experiencing an increase in infections, raising concerns that COVID could spread throughout the country during the Lunar New Year holiday next month.
Murray stated on Friday when the IHME estimates were posted online, “Nobody anticipated they would stick to zero-COVID as long as they did.
Despite the fact that China’s zero-COVID policy may have been successful in containing previous viral varieties, the great transmissibility of Omicron variants rendered it unsustainable, he claimed.
Governments and businesses have depended on the independent modelling team at the University of Washington in Seattle throughout the epidemic. They used information from a recent Omicron outbreak in Hong Kong as well as provincial statistics.
“Since the initial Wuhan event, almost no deaths have been recorded in China. We turned to Hong Kong for this reason to get an idea of the infection fatality rate “said Murray.
IHME additionally incorporates data on vaccination rates provided by the Chinese government in its forecasts, along with projections of how different provinces will react when infection rates rise.
Other specialists predict that 60% of China’s population will eventually contract the disease, with a peak in infection anticipated in January. Vulnerable groups, such as the elderly and people with pre-existing diseases, would be most hit.
China’s sizable population of sensitive people, the use of ineffective vaccinations, and the low vaccination rates among people 80 and older, who are most at risk for serious illness, are major causes for concern.
Extra Models
Disease modellers at the University of Hong Kong predicted that the lifting of COVID restrictions and simultaneous reopening of all provinces in December 2022 through January 2023 would result in 684 deaths per million people during that time period in a paper published on Wednesday on the Medrxiv preprint server that has not yet been subjected to peer review.
That equates to 964,400 deaths, based on China’s population of 1.41 billion and excluding interventions like a widespread immunisation booster programme.
A second study conducted by researchers at the School of Public Health at Fudan University in Shanghai and published in July 2022 in Nature Medicine predicted that an Omicron wave without restrictions would cause 1.55 million deaths over a six-month period and result in a peak demand for intensive care units that was 15.6 times greater than the available capacity.
164 million Chinese citizens have diabetes, which is a risk factor for having COVID, according to Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. Eight million adults 80 years of age and older are also unvaccinated.
Officials in China are now advising people to obtain booster doses from a list of more recent Chinese-made vaccinations, but, according to Huang, the government is still hesitant to employ foreign vaccines.
The National Health Commission of China announced on Friday that it was increasing immunisation rates and stockpiling ventilators and critical medications.
