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- 28 March 2022
The country needs to control the virus until it has boosted vaccination rates in elderly people and reinforced the health-care system.
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But others say that China needs to brace itself for a growing outbreak. New infections are edging towards 6,000 confirmed cases a day. “It’s growing quickly — I think it’s out of control now,” says Michael Osterholm, an infectious-diseases epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Case numbers are unlikely to come back down to zero, he says, and trying to keep the virus suppressed would require such severe restrictions that “it surely will bring down their economy”.
If Omicron runs out of control, the effects could be devastating — and similar to the current outbreak in Hong Kong, where deaths have surged and hospitals are overwhelmed. An analysis by Airfinity, a life-sciences market analytics firm in London, suggests that more than one million people in mainland China could die during an Omicron wave, partly because only 50% of people over the age of 80 are fully vaccinated.
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Fifty-two million people aged over 60 years are yet to be fully vaccinated. The most vulnerable — those aged over 80 years — are the least well vaccinated, with only 20% having received the primary vaccination course and booster shot. Work by Cowling and his colleagues that is yet to be peer reviewed indicates that the Sinovac vaccine, one of the two main vaccines used in China, is effective at reducing severe cases and deaths, but that the third shot is necessary to confer high levels of protection in those aged over 601.
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