Beijing: Could the COVID-19 surge in China unleash a new coronavirus mutant on the world? Scientists don’t know but there is concern that it may happen. It could be similar to the Omicron variant circulating out there now. It could be a combination of strains. Or something completely different, they say. “China has a huge population and limited immunity. And it looks like we could be seeing a new kind of explosion,” said infectious disease specialist Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray of Johns Hopkins University.
Every new infection gives the coronavirus an opportunity to mutate, and the virus is spreading rapidly in China.
country of 1.4 billion has largely abandoned it ‘Zero Covid’ Policy,
Although the overall reported vaccination rate is high, booster levels are low, especially among older people.
Domesticated vaccines have proven to be less effective against severe infections than Western-made messenger RNA versions. Many were given more than a year ago, meaning immunity has waned.
Fertile ground for turning the ‘result’ virus.
“When we’ve seen large waves of infection, it’s often followed by new variants,” Ray said.
About three years ago, the original version of the coronavirus spread from China to the rest of the world and was eventually replaced by the Delta version, then Omicron and its descendants, which continue to plague the world today.
Dr. Shan-Lu Liu, who studies the virus at Ohio State University, said several current Omicron variants have been detected in China, including BF.7, which is highly adept at evading immunity and is believed to This is driving the current growth.
experts said partly immune population like china Puts special pressure on the virus to mutate. Ray compared the virus to a boxer who “learns to avoid the skills you have and adapts to avoid them.”
A big unknown is whether a new variant will cause more severe disease. Experts say there is no underlying biological reason why the virus should lighten up over time.
“The softening that we’ve experienced over the last six to 12 months in many parts of the world is due to accumulated immunity either through vaccination or infection, not because the virus has changed,” Ray said.
In China, most people have never been exposed to the coronavirus. China’s vaccines rely on an older technology that produces fewer antibodies than messenger RNA vaccines,
Given those realities, Dr. Gagandeep Kang, who studies the virus at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, said it remains to be seen “whether the virus will follow the same pattern of development in China as in the rest of the world.” . After the vaccines come.” Or, he asked, “would the pattern of growth be entirely different?”
Recently, the World Health Organization had expressed concern over reports of serious illness in China.
Around the cities of Baoding and Langfang outside Beijing, a surge in severe cases has left hospitals running short of intensive care beds and staff.
Xu Wenbo of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said China plans to track the virus centers around three city hospitals in each province, where samples will be collected from walk-in patients who are very sick and who come to the hospital each week. Weeks die. A briefing Tuesday.
Of the 130 Omicron variants detected in China, 50 had caused the outbreak, he said.
He said the country was creating a national genetic database “to monitor in real time” how the different strains were evolving and the potential implications for public health.
However, at this point, there is limited information about genetic viral sequencing coming out of China, said Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “We don’t know what’s going on,” Luban said.