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Chinese health service volunteers in front of a hospital in Beijing
Photo: Wu Hao/EPA
A gigantic wave of infections is sweeping through China.
An estimated one million people are currently infected with the corona virus every day.
Such high rates of new infections entail an increased risk of mutations - then new virus variants could arise which, in the worst case, are more contagious or dangerous for humans.
The Chinese health authorities have now announced that they want to keep an eye on the development of the virus.
All provinces would have to select three hospitals in three cities each, which would collect samples of 15 infections, 10 severe illnesses and all the dead every week, director of the National Health Bureau's Virus Institute Xu Wenbo said, according to state media on Friday.
After the decoding and analysis of the genomes, the study results should be reported within a week.
The official Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying that the current omicron variants and "possible symptoms, transmission abilities and pathogenicity of new variants with potential biological changes" could be observed in real time.
US urges China to be more transparent
The foreign policy spokesman for the Union faction, Jürgen Hardt, had previously discussed stopping flight connections with the People's Republic.
On Friday, the USA also asked China to be open in dealing with the massive corona wave.
In a phone call with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken underscored "the need for transparency for the international community," according to a statement from the US State Department.
The call also came amid fears that China is downplaying the scale and severity of the outbreak.
China reports only a few thousand infections a day, while foreign experts assume around a million new infections a day.
The corona outbreak was not mentioned in a statement from the Beijing Foreign Ministry on the phone call.
About 3,000 new cases of infection were announced in China on Wednesday and for the second day in a row no one was said to have fallen victim to the virus.
A Chinese health official said the country only counts deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in the official Covid-19 death toll.
Unlike in other countries, deaths with previous illnesses are not included in the official statistics.
Biontech's omicron vaccine approved in Hong Kong
In the meantime, the omicron vaccine from the Mainz-based company Biontech and its Chinese partner Fosun Pharma has been regularly approved in the Chinese special administrative region of Hong Kong.
The company said on Friday that Comirnaty was the first and only vaccine to be approved for booster vaccinations in Hong Kong.
The original vaccine, which targets the archetype of the coronavirus, has been available in Hong Kong since March 2021.
As part of a provisional approval, the Omikron vaccine has also been vaccinated since the beginning of December.
There are still no signals from China to use the West’s corona vaccines.
China's domestic production of medical supplies is expanding and is generally sufficient, a State Department spokesman said when asked about a US offer of assistance.
According to government data, the vaccination rate in China is over 90 percent, but only around 58 percent of adults have received a booster vaccination - for people over 80 the figure is just over 42 percent.
The vaccines from Chinese companies are considered to be slightly less effective compared to Western preparations.
According to model calculations by the London-based research institute Airfinity, the current wave of infections in China will experience two peaks in January and March with possibly 3.7 million and 4.2 million cases a day, respectively.
Currently, the data processor estimates the number of new infections in China at probably more than a million and the number of deaths at more than 5,000 a day, according to a release.
After almost three years of lockdowns, forced quarantines, mass testing and contact tracing, China abruptly lifted its tough zero-Covid policy on December 7th.
The about-face was justified by the fact that infections with the new omicron variants were no longer as severe.
Experts see the reason above all in the fact that the strict measures could no longer be maintained in view of the explosive spread.
The rigorous restrictions had also placed an increasing burden on the second largest economy.
joe/dpa/Reuters
