Posted: Nov 28, 2021 14:22 GMT
The results show that at the moment China is not ready to adopt “opening strategies based solely on the herd immunity hypothesis.”
China could face hundreds of thousands of daily coronavirus infections if it decided to deviate from its zero tolerance policy towards covid-19, reveals a new report published on Wednesday on the China CDC Weekly scientific portal managed by the Chinese Center for Control and Prevention of Diseases.
The report, supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is based on scenarios and actual data from a number of “typical western countries” such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Spain and France with the aim of evaluating possible consequences of the adoption of their response strategies to the pandemic applied in the Chinese context.
The analysis showed that, by employing the US strategy, China would face a worst-case scenario with more than 600,000 cases of covid-19 daily. In particular, it was found that China’s adoption of anticovid measures in the countries studied would result in the following scenarios:
USA.: 637,155 daily cases;France: 454,198 daily cases;Israel: 442,221 daily cases;Spain: 319,969 daily cases;United Kingdom: 275,793 daily cases.
According to the scientists, the results represent a “optimistic” case since by default it considers a series of simplifications. Thus, the study assumes that the vaccination rate in China is equal to that of other nations cited in the research, while the population density in the Asian country is just as low.
“Unaffordable burden for the health system”
“We can see that even with the overly optimistic assumptions mentioned, the number of daily infections in China is highly likely to be in the hundreds of thousands if China would adopt the strategies of the countries cited,” the report reads. “The estimates revealed a real chance of a huge outbreak that will almost certainly place an unaffordable burden on the health system, “the scientists conclude.
According to the report, the results show that China at the moment not ready to adopt “opening strategies based solely on the hypothesis of vaccination-induced herd immunity, advocated by certain Western countries. “
According to the health authorities, in the last 24 hours in China there have been 23 covid-19 cases. In total, the Asian giant has reported 98,631 coronavirus infections and 4,636 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Infection numbers in China continue to decline in part thanks to the government’s zero tolerance policy, which emphasizes containing and tracking infections, sometimes through mass lockdowns.
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