China is struggling with the Corona winter wave: A breeding ground for new mutations?
Created: 2022-12-17 09:23
By: Leonie Hudelmaier
China is relaxing its strict zero-Covid policy.
But instead of using the newly won freedom, the population is overwhelmed by a corona wave.
Munich – The streets in Beijing's actually so busy shopping district have been swept empty.
Only two passersby with white face masks dared to go out in the cold winter air.
Shops are closed, crowds of people only exist in front of hospitals and corona test stations.
Scenes that sound like past pandemic times are still part of everyday life in many Chinese metropolises.
Although the Chinese regime has been increasingly relaxing its strict zero-Covid policy for the past week.
How does that fit together?
A corona wave has been rolling over the country of 1.4 billion inhabitants for weeks.
She encounters an unprepared populace.
“Immunity is distributed quite homogeneously worldwide, in industrialized countries through infection through vaccination, in poorer countries even through multiple infections of the population.
In China, however, that is not the case," said virologist Christian Drosten of "Zeit" at the end of November.
The effects in China are noticeable: rows of people are falling ill, clinics are experiencing a rush and medicines are in short supply in pharmacies.
Corona wave in China: Many infections can mean mutations
The Chinese government is relaxed.
The Chinese epidemiologist and government advisor Zhong Nanshan suggests calling Covid-19 just the corona cold.
Because: After the virus mutations, the upper respiratory tract is now mainly affected and less the lungs.
A woman picks up COVID-19 antigen kits at a pharmacy in Beijing.
© Andy Wong/AP/dpa
Concern is growing about how the corona situation in China is affecting world health.
Because many infections can also mean new mutations.
In fact, a new Omicron variant is currently rampant in China: BF.7.
According to the epidemiologist Nanshan, this particularly easily transmissible variant is spreading in Beijing and the surrounding province of Hebei.
But: Drosten gives the all-clear for the new variant, because a large part of the world's population is immune, since it is a sub-variant of Omicron BA.
5 is.
British virologist considers the danger in China to be manageable
But in China, the population is less immune.
"I wouldn't rule out another leap happening there in terms of evolution," said Drosten recently.
The British virologist Francois Balloux, on the other hand, considers the danger to be manageable.
At the end of November, he explained on Twitter that mutations in the past did not arise during large corona waves, but rather drove them.
Should a new corona variant develop in China anyway, the world would probably only find out about it later.
China made headlines with the first wave of the virus because it only released bits and pieces of information about a lung disease that was still a mystery at the time.
The Chinese information policy has not changed much to this day.
The country does not reliably report the number of infected people – insofar as they are still recorded – or the decoded genomes.
According to the World Health Organization, the current wave rolled before the most recent easing.
The zero Covid strategy was reaching its limits.
