NEW DELHI: Healthcare workers across China are seeing a large number of people who have been re-infected with the Omicron variant of Covid-19, putting further strain on the country’s healthcare system, said media reports. has gone. “The incidence of reinfection increased significantly with Omicron,” said Chen, an attending physician at the No. 2 Affiliated Hospital of Hunan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
“Some statistics suggest that out of three million cases, about 100,000 people got re-infection, which is about 3 percent,” Chen said.
Reports of an infection rate of about 70 percent in most parts of China in recent days would mean that an estimated 900 million people in China have been infected with Omicron at least once. The RFA pointed out that if Chain’s figure were to be applied nationwide, it would mean that the country was also experiencing about 10 million reinfections.
A health worker named Li in the northern city of Shijiazhuang said medics are now seeing a wave of secondary infections because of the damage done by COVID-19 on the immune system.
“Because of the damage done to the immune system by the first infection with COVID-19, we are hearing about a significant number of reinfections in areas outside the city,” Lee said. “People are presenting with pain that is five to 10 times worse than during their first infection.”
RFA reported that a doctor from the same city, who did not wish to be named, said patients were getting re-infected only a month after recovering from their first phase, and their immunity has been weakened by the virus.
Her account was supported by health workers in hospitals in the northern city of Taiyuan and the central province of Hunan.
Top internal medicine expert Zhang Boli warned the general public to be careful against reinfection in an interview with the Science and Technology Daily newspaper.
Virologists have long been warning about the possibility of re-infection with the Omicron variant of COVID-19. A study by researchers at Imperial College London showed Omicron to be highly capable of re-infecting people, even if they were triple-vaccinated, the RFA reported.
The study’s lead author, Rosemary Boynton, said in June 2022 that being infected with Omicron “does not confer a potent boost of immunity against reinfection with Omicron in the future”.
Meanwhile, a November 10, 2022 study in the scientific journal Nature found that “re-infection (with COVID-19) during early illness and in the months following increases the risk of death, hospitalization, and sequelae in multiple organ systems.” and amplifies.” Follow.
The RFA pointed out that millions of people are currently heading back to their ancestral homes ahead of the Lunar New Year on January 22, raising fears of a peak wave of COVID-19 infections in rural areas.