By January 2023
9Almost 250 million people in China may have caught Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate from the nation’s top health officials, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times reported Friday, December 23, 2022. If correct, the estimate, which cannot be confirmed, would account for roughly 18% of China’s 1.4 billion people and represent the largest Covid-19 outbreak to date globally. . .
There are major factors from the backdrop of the current Chinese outbreak: 1) failed “COVID-19 Zero” policies that kept a large fraction of the population in lockdown, thus preventing the more permissive general spread and immune challenge; 2) mass deployment of the Sinovac Coronovac killed whole virus vaccine.1
While the vaccine is apparently completely ineffective against Omicron, it may be responsible for misdirecting the immune system or paradoxically making infections worse in a process called antibody-dependent enhancement. China has recently expanded the choice of vaccines to a total of 12 COVID-19 vaccines available2. . . The fourth dose may be implemented in the near future, starting with specific risk groups.
In a recent CNN interview, Dr. Jessica Justman, an associate professor of medicine in epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and senior technical director of the global health program there, said, “I’m concerned that China right now is one giant incubator of SARS-CoV-2. There is the potential to have so many infections and, with that, new variants.”3
This week’s McCullough Report is dedicated to the current Chinese crisis with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, host of “The Voice of Dr. Yan.”4 Dr. Yan, a Chinese virologist, is keeping in close contact with informants inside mainland China.
Some important issues came out during the interview: 1) the proportion of Chinese citizens immunized with the Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine, whereas none of the US population, so the immune systems have been primed differently; 2) a large unknown fraction of the Chinese infections may be recurrent infections; 3) an unknown fraction of the hospitalizations and deaths may be due to recurrent infection as opposed to index cases; this would be distinctly unusual since second and third infections in the US have been mild and inconsequential; 4) it is unclear how the Chinese are deploying early treatments; however, Dr. Yan indicated that unfortunately the Chinese had missed the boat on simple, affordable, and available viricidal nasal washes (povidone-iodine, peroxide, colloidal silver, xylitol, etc.).
The interview and the insights of Dr. Yan on the world’s largest population are invaluable at this time of crisis.
1 https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/the-sinovac-covid-19-vaccine-what-you-need-to-know
2 https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202212/1281267.shtml?id=11
3 https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/health/covid-variants-concern-new-year/index.html
4 https://www.americaoutloud.com/voice-of-dr-yan/
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