Rajeev Choudhury

China’s zero COVID strategy is not sustainable considering the behaviour of the virus, the Director-General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during a media briefing on May 10, 2022.

Responding to a question, the WHO director-general said that changing measures will be important in view of the changing behaviour of the virus in the coming days.

“We have discussed this issue with the Chinese experts and we indicated that the approach will not be sustainable and considering the behaviour of the virus, I think a shift will be very important,” Dr Tedros added.

Reiterating that a dynamic and adjustable agile policy is needed for combatting the pandemic WHO’s emergency director Dr Mike Ryan said, “in the beginning of the pandemic (there) was a lack of agility in many places that resulted in a lot of harm.”

Noting that the country reported just over 15,000 COVID related deaths during the pandemic, Dr Ryan said that China has something to protect in view of the deaths rapidly rising in the country in the recent months, particularly after February 2022.

However the governments’ actions in containing the spread of the disease should show due respect to individual human rights, he stressed.

“We need to balance the control measures against the impact that they have on the society and economy, and that’s not always an easy calibration to make,” WHO’s emergency director said.

Meanwhile, researchers of a study from Shanghai’s Fudan University say that abandoning the long-held zero COVID policy could result in causing approximately 1.6 million deaths.

The researchers of the study, which was published in the journal Nature Medicine on May 10, 2022, noted that the level of immunity induced by the March 2022 vaccination campaign would be insufficient to prevent an Omicron wave that would result in exceeding critical care capacity with a projected intensive care unit peak demand of 15.6-times the existing capacity.

In the absence of non-pharmaceutical interventions, the introduction of the Omicron variant in the country could have the potential to generate a tsunami of COVID19 cases leading to a projected 112.2 million symptomatic cases, 5.1 million hospitalisations, and 1.7 million ICU admissions, with significant wave occurring between May and July 2022, the researchers noted.

“The majority of deaths (76.7%) are estimated to occur among non-vaccinated individuals, despite representing only 12.1% of the population. Unvaccinated individuals aged 60 years or more are projected to account for 74.7% of the total number of deaths due to the gap in vaccination coverage in this portion of the population,” they wrote.

“The contemporary increasing of vaccine uptake in the elderly and widespread distribution of antiviral therapies or the implementation of strict NPIs would be needed to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system and reduce the death toll of an epidemic wave to a level comparable with that of an influenza season,” the researchers concluded.