CHICAGO, Dec 16 (Reuters) – China’s abrupt lifting of strict COVID-19 restrictions could lead to an explosion of cases and more than a million deaths by 2023, according to new projections from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the United States. .
According to the group’s projections, cases in China would peak around April 1, when the death toll would reach 322,000. By then, about a third of China’s population will have been infected, said IHME director Christopher Murray.
China’s national health authority has not reported any official deaths from COVID since the lifting of COVID restrictions. The last official deaths were reported on December 3.
The total number of deaths due to the pandemic is 5,235.
China lifted some of the world’s toughest COVID restrictions in December after unprecedented public protests and is now experiencing a surge in infections, with fears that COVID could sweep through its 1.4 billion people during the holiday season Next month’s Lunar New Year.
“Nobody thought they would stay zero-COVID as long as they did,” Murray said Friday when the IHME projections were posted online.
China’s zero-COVID policy may have been effective in keeping earlier variants of the virus at bay, but the high transmissibility of the Omicron variants meant it could not be sustained, he said.
The independent modeling group at the University of Washington in Seattle, which governments and businesses have relied on throughout the pandemic, relied on provincial data and information from a recent Omicron outbreak in Hong Kong.
“Since the original outbreak in Wuhan, China has reported almost no deaths. That’s why we looked at Hong Kong to get an idea of the death rate from infection,” Murray said.
For its forecasts, IHME also uses information on vaccination rates provided by the Chinese government, as well as assumptions about how various provinces will respond as infection rates increase.
Other experts expect that roughly 60 percent of China’s population will eventually become infected, with a peak expected in January, which will hit vulnerable populations like the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions the hardest.
Major concerns include China’s large susceptible population, the use of less effective vaccines, and low vaccine coverage among the over-80s, who are most at risk of serious disease.
OTHER MODELS
Disease modelers at the University of Hong Kong predict that lifting COVID restrictions and simultaneously reopening all provinces from December 2022 to January 2023 would result in 684 deaths per million people over that time period, according to a paper published Wednesday on the preprint server Medrxiv that has not yet undergone peer review.
Based on China’s population of 1.41 billion, and without measures such as a massive vaccination booster campaign, that amounts to 964,400 deaths. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.14.22283460v1.full.pdf
Another study published in July 2022 in Nature Medicine by researchers at the School of Public Health at Fudan University in Shanghai predicted that absent Omicron wave restrictions would result in 1.55 million deaths over a period of six months and a maximum demand for intensive care units of 15.6 times more. than the existing capacity. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01855-7
Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said China has 164 million people with diabetes, a risk factor for poor outcomes from COVID. There are also 8 million people aged 80 and over who have never been vaccinated.
Chinese officials are encouraging individuals to boost themselves from a list of new vaccines made in China, but the government is still reluctant to use foreign vaccines, Huang said.
China’s National Health Commission said on Friday it was ramping up vaccinations and increasing stocks of ventilators and essential medicines.
Additional reporting by Deena Beasley in Los Angeles; edited by Caroline Humer and Michael Perry
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