Any chance of China emerging sooner rather than later from its latest mass coronavirus outbreak is slim as 80 percent of the country’s population has been infected, a prominent government scientist warned Saturday.
Reuters reports Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the mass movement of people during the current Lunar New Year holiday period may spread the pandemic, boosting infections in some areas.
A second coronavirus wave is unlikely in the next two to three months, he predicted, on the basis so many now have the infection and the multiple sub-branches of the Omicron strain “has already infected 80 percent of the population”Wu Zunyou was mentioned as having said it on Weibo’s social media platform.
Wu’s statement came as hundreds of millions of Chinese people travelled across the country for holiday reunions that had been suspended under recently eased COVID-19 curbs.
On Thursday, January 19, 20,23, elderly patients were checked in an emergency department at a Beijing hospital. China was accused Thursday “some Western media” of bias, smears and political manipulation in their coverage of China’s abrupt ending of its strict “zero-COVID” policy. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
An elderly woman in a mask walks past empty coffins at the Beijing mortuary. Friday, January 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
According to Reuters data, nearly 60,000 coronavirus-infected people had died at hospital by January 12th. This was roughly a month following China’s abrupt end of its zero-coronavirus policy.
However, experts believe that the figure may underestimate the effect. It is impossible to know the exact number of people who died from coronavirus because government statistics do not include those who are at home. Many doctors also discourage patients from citing it as a cause for death.
China has suspended or closed the social media accounts of more than 1,000 critics of the Communist government’s policies on the coronavirus outbreak, as the country moves to further open up while denying any setbacks or associated health risks for the population.
A patient of an elderly watches as a doctor checks on her during intravenous drips. This was Thursday, January 19, 2023, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
Just last month British analytics company Airfinity published a report estimating some 5,000 people were dying in China a day as a result of Chinese coronavirus infections – a significantly higher number than the seven Chinese government officials admitted to all week, as Breitbart News reported.
Based on analysis of hospital cases and hospitals in China, the scientific estimate was published before Bloomberg’s report claiming that 37,000 coronavirus infection records were being kept in China every day.
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