Covid-19: As infections sour, over a million Chinese may die in 2023
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: For three years, beginning in January 2020, China completely suppressed reports about Covid-19’s actual impact and severely punished journalists trying to uncover the facts. As on December 17, 2022, Beijing’s official death toll because of Covid-19 was just 5,235, while the worldwide number was 6,642,832.
Come 2023. China cannot hide unpleasant facts. For, the new Covid model predicts over a million Chinese deaths in the new year, beginning two weeks later.
China’s abrupt lifting of stringent Zero-Covid curbs under extreme pressure from widespread public protests could cause an explosion of cases and over a million deaths through 2023, according to new projections from the U.S.-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), the media reported on Saturday.
Cases in China would peak around April 1 next year, when deaths would reach 322,000. About a third of China’s population will have been infected by then, IHME Director Christopher Murray said.
China’s national health authority, the National Health Commission, has reported no official Covid deaths since the lifting of restrictions. They reported the last official deaths on December 3, 2022, at 5,235.
Beijing lifted some of the world’s toughest restrictions early this month after unprecedented public protests and is now experiencing a spike in infections, with fears the pandemic could sweep across its 1.4 billion population during next month’s Lunar New Year holidays. The coming Chinese Lunar New Year falls on January 22, 2023, when millions of people will travel to their native places or holiday spots, intermingling and potentially spreading the virus.
“Nobody thought they would stick to Zero-Covid policy as long as they did,” Murray said on Friday as the IHME released projections online.
He said China’s stringent policy may have been effective at keeping earlier variants of the virus at bay, but the high transmissibility of Omicron variants made it impossible to sustain.
The independent modeling group at the University of Washington in Seattle, which has been relied on by governments and companies throughout the pandemic, drew on provincial data and information from a recent Omicron outbreak in Hong Kong, the reports said.
“China has since the original Wuhan outbreak barely reported any deaths. That is why we looked to Hong Kong to get an idea of the infection fatality rate,” Murray said.
For its forecasts, IHME also used information on vaccination rates provided by the Chinese government and assumptions on how various provinces will respond as infection rates increase.
Other experts expect some 60 percent of China’s population will eventually be infected, with a peak expected in January 2023, hitting vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions, the hardest.
Health officials’ key concerns include China’s large pool of susceptible individuals, less effective vaccines, and low vaccine coverage among those 80 and older, who are at the biggest risk of severe disease.
Disease modelers at the University of Hong Kong predict that lifting restrictions and simultaneously reopening all provinces in December 2022 through January 2023 could cause 684 deaths per million people during that timeframe, according to a paper released on Wednesday on the Medrxiv preprint server that has yet to undergo peer review.
Based on China’s population of 1.41 billion, and without measures such as a mass vaccination booster campaign, that means 964,400 deaths.
Another study published in July 2022 in Nature Medicine by researchers at the School of Public Health at Fudan University in Shanghai predicted an Omicron wave absent restrictions would cause 1.55 million deaths over a six-month period, and peak demand for intensive care units of 15.6 times higher than the existing capacity.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said China has 164 million people with diabetes, a risk factor for poor Covid outcomes. There are also 8 million people aged 80 and older who have never been vaccinated.
Chinese officials are now encouraging individuals to get boosted from a list of newer Chinese-made shots. However, the government is still reluctant to use foreign vaccines, Huang said.
China’s National Health Commission said it was ramping up vaccinations and building stocks of ventilators and essential drugs.
