HONG KONG – The world should “calm down” about the possibility of new Covid-19 variants circulating in China, leading Chinese scientist George Gao said.
A paper by Dr Gao and colleagues published in medical journal The Lancet on Wednesday showed that no new variants had emerged in the initial weeks of China’s recent outbreak, after the end of its zero-Covid policy saw a huge wave of cases.
“The world should completely calm down from the fear that there are new variants or special variants circulating (in China),” Dr Gao, a professor at the Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the former head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Reuters.
The variants causing infections in China were the same Omicron sub-variants – BA.5.2 and BF.7 – seen elsewhere in the world, he said by e-mail.
The study analysed 413 new Covid-19 cases in Beijing from Nov 14 to Dec 20, 2022, and found that all were most likely caused by existing strains. It found that 90 per cent of the mostly locally acquired infections were due to the above two sub-variants.
The findings are representative of the entire country, the authors said, citing the characteristics of Beijing’s population and circulation of highly transmissible Covid-19 strains.
China last December ended more than three years of a stringent zero-Covid policy involving citywide lockdowns, mass testing and extensive quarantine. This was followed by a wave of infections across its 1.4 billion population.
A prominent government scientist said on Jan 21 that 80 per cent of people in the country had already been infected, and China’s CDC has said repeatedly in the past month that continuous monitoring showed no new strains of Covid-19 have been found.
Many countries put in place Covid-19 testing requirements for Chinese travellers in the wake of the country’s large outbreak, citing concerns about the possibility of new variants emerging and a lack of data, though China has said the measures are not justified.
Dr Gao said China was continuing widespread viral genomic sequencing, and would identify any new variants if they emerged.
He said cases were currently declining, but “a new wave is possible in the future”.
The Chinese-funded study in The Lancet was conducted by researchers from the Beijing Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the CDC and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The authors said there were some limitations to the study, including China’s decision to end large-scale mandatory testing.
In the CDC’s latest statement on Wednesday, it said that from Sept 26, 2022, to Monday, 23,217 local cases of the coronavirus with valid genome sequences were reported nationwide. All were mutant strains of Omicron, with the main epidemic strains of BA.5.2.48 (53 per cent), BF.7.14 (24.1 per cent) and BA.5.2.49 (14.8 per cent).
A total of 13 cases of variants were found, including one case of XBB.1, five cases of BQ.1.1, one case of BQ.1.1.17, four cases of BQ.1.2 and two cases of BQ.1.8. REUTERS
