Day: December 15, 2022

A week after China dramatically eased its three-year-long zero-COVID policy of lockdowns and near-daily PCR testing, the country is experiencing its biggest wave of COVID-19 infections since the pandemic began in 2020.

But Ray Yip, an American epidemiologist and a former director of the China branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Professor Jin Dong-Yan, a virologist in the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Biochemistry, say the relatively mild nature of omicron, China’s high vaccination rate and people voluntarily staying home, could help China avoid a huge increase in deaths.

Yip, who is also a former head of the China office for UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jin, a respected virologist, explained to VOA’s Cindy Sui why the situation in China may not be as bad as feared.

These December 14 and 15 interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

VOA: What is going on in China’s hospitals?

Yip: Most hospitals in big cities right now are overrun, but they are overrun from basically people with symptoms that don’t have to go to the hospital, like fever and runny nose. The truth is, COVID is like any flu. Unless you’ve developed respiratory failure and you need to have higher-level care, you get better on your own. You just drink a lot of fluid and stay in bed. But in China, most people, most parents, believe every time your child or your family member has anything not well, you rush them to the hospital emergency room to get [an] IV. Half the people don’t know you can use something like ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and manage the fever yourself.  

So right now, is there an omicron outbreak in Beijing, in Shanghai, in every place? The answer is yes. But that doesn’t mean hospitals’ intensive care is overrun and the number of deaths of the elderly is shooting through the roof.

Jin: Most of the cases are mild. Some of them describe it as worse than the flu. That’s actually not very surprising because it’s just like the flu.

VOA: Could there be a lot of severe cases that we just don’t know about?

Jin: That’s not possible because the virus is very mild and the vaccination rate in the elderly is not very, very low. (According to government statistics, 86% of the elderly aged 60 or above have had two shots and 68% have had a third booster shot). It’s much higher than in February in Hong Kong (when a major outbreak occurred).

The rate of severe cases or deaths should not be that high … because 99.5% of the people will just have mild or no symptoms for omicron. It’s the same everywhere. As long as they do well in vaccinating the elderly and giving them oral antivirals, the number of severe cases and deaths can be avoided.

VOA: With so many new infections, is there a possibility that the same thing that happened in India will happen in China as omicron spreads, given that there are only 3.6 intensive care beds per 100,000 people in China?

Yip: I don’t think that will happen in China. Omicron doesn’t do that. Omicron causes symptoms of cold. It doesn’t cause pneumonia. It doesn’t make you have trouble breathing. It’s upper respiratory.

Jin: That’s completely different because it’s not the same virus and strain. That will not happen in Beijing. For most people, there won’t be need for respirators because it’s the same viral strain as in Inner Mongolia, and as you can see there are not that many deaths and severe cases there. The concept that the virus strain is particularly virulent and will kill a lot of people is wrong.

VOA: According to the government, 90% of the population has been vaccinated with two doses of Chinese vaccines, but a much lower percentage — 56% of the overall population, and just 40% of those 80 or older — have had a booster shot. Would there still be an increase in deaths among the most vulnerable people?

Yip: All those people having COVID now, they are not very old. So, the question is, will this become so pervasive, so rapid, that it will actually overwhelm the elderly population in a very short period of time? If that happens, then there are fears that what happened in Wuhan in the first few weeks in January 2020 will happen again, with bodies lying in the hallways, not enough hospital beds and respirators.

I really doubt these scenes will repeat themselves. My prediction is that even if China gets a very sharp curve, the outcome — in terms of overwhelming the hospitals and deaths — will not be as bad as what happened in Wuhan in 2020 because it’s a different virus. Omicron, even though it’s COVID, is much milder.

There will be 200,000 excess deaths, mostly elderly people. But if you spread that out over a huge country like China, that’s not huge.

Jin: There’s always a danger, but every country has to face that. It’s just that China is facing it all of a sudden. Sooner or later, there would be a tsunami, it’s not a big deal, but they do need to pay more attention to severe cases.  In reality, how they can deal with severe cases and identify them is difficult. If they can quickly deliver oral antiviral drugs to those who need it, or those with chronic underlying diseases, it will also save a lot of lives.

VOA: What can China do to avoid a large number of deaths?

Yip: They can minimize deaths by getting the elderly vaccinated and making sure everybody gets three shots. They can also soften the curve, by keeping the rise in cases spread out over a longer period of time. A sharp curve will result in many people getting very sick that might overwhelm the hospitals. But if there’s a gentle curve that goes up over a longer period of time, then the hospitals will be able to handle the caseloads.

With China’s curve, we just have to see. But my prediction is it may not be as bad as one assumes, and the reason for that is that most Chinese in the big cities are totally scared. Beijing right now is in a semi-imposed semi-lockdown. You can go anywhere you want, but people are not going, because everybody right now hears COVID is running amok. So, everybody is staying in their apartment, which is good. By doing that, they will actually make the curve more gentle, not as steep.

Jin: Actually, the most important thing is to educate the general public and explain the rationale of the new policy. They should tell people they don’t need to go to the hospitals, because if everyone infected goes to the hospitals, the hospitals will collapse at some point.

In terms of the curve, they want to have 60% of people infected in the first wave. That’s not possible if everyone stays home, because the virus will not spread anymore. It’s possible it’ll be like Taiwan and Singapore, they will see several waves. They hope to have 80% of the population infected in the second wave.

VOA: Is there a chance China might ride out this storm largely unscathed?

Yip: There’s a reasonable chance China actually might, if what I’m hoping or projecting comes true. As we mentioned earlier, a flatter curve allows the system to absorb the shock. We don’t know. I think you need to wait for another minimum of three weeks to tell. Omicron actually is the best thing that happened to the world. Without omicron, if the virus was still like the delta variant, the alpha, the Wuhan strain, you would be scared every place you go. Omicron immunized everybody. The whole continent of Africa was immunized by omicron.

Jin: We expect the severe cases will be low and they should be able to handle this.  If they cannot handle it, they should use other measures to flatten the curve. There are 101 measures to do this. They can close schools, shut down buses, metro systems, they can do everything.

VOA: So, if China also survives this omicron wave, would you agree with Chinese analysts’ assertions that China will have prevented millions of deaths with its zero-COVID policy, even though it has been blamed for hurting the economy and people’s livelihoods, while also restricting  freedom?

Jin: I think so because that’s the reality, because the most lethal waves are already over. Those are delta, alpha … They have saved millions of lives because they did the lockdown initially and it could have been much worse if they didn’t.

Yip: That is true. I’ll tell you why. China did this zero-COVID policy when the bad virus was around — the virus that killed a lot of people, the one you saw in India, in New York, in Italy, in many parts of the world. It killed a million Americans. Those were the older strains. So, China basically said, ‘I protect you during bad virus times, but we got a good virus now. I’m going to let you get infected. You will get sick. You will get a cold. But most of you, if you’re under 50, you have zero chance to die. If you’re over 60 and you’re immunized, you’re in good condition.’

So basically, China averted a major curve of COVID-related deaths. But I tell you, people in the West don’t like to hear that because it makes China look good. You should report it. What I’m telling you is based on epidemiology. It’s based on science. I’m not telling you based on politics. 
…

China raced to vaccinate its most vulnerable people on Thursday in anticipation of waves of COVID-19 infections, with some analysts expecting the death toll to soar after it eased strict controls that had kept the pandemic at bay for three years. 

The push comes as the World Health Organization also raised concerns that China’s 1.4 billion population was not adequately vaccinated and the United States offered help in dealing with a surge in infections.

Beijing last Wednesday began dismantling its tough ‘zero-COVID’ controls, dropping testing requirements and easing quarantine rules that had caused mental stress for tens of millions and battered the world’s second largest economy.

The pivot away from President Xi Jinping’s signature “zero-COVID” policy followed unprecedented widespread protests against it. But, WHO emergencies director Mike Ryan said infections were exploding in China well before the government’s decision to phase out its stringent regime. 

“There’s a narrative at the moment that China lifted the restrictions and all of a sudden the disease is out of control,” Ryan told a briefing in Geneva.

“The disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease.”

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Thursday China has “institutional advantages” to fight COVID.

“We will certainly be able to smoothly get through the peak of the epidemic,” he told a regular news briefing in response to White House national security spokesperson John Kirby saying that the U.S. was ready to help if China requested it.

There are increasing signs of chaos during China’s change of tack – with long queues outside fever clinics, runs on medicines and panic buying across the country.

One video posted online on Wednesday showed several people in thick winter clothes hooked up to intravenous drips as they sat on stools on the street outside a clinic in central Hubei province. Reuters verified the location of the video.

The COVID scare in China also led people in Hong Kong, Macau and in some neighborhoods in Australia to go in search for fever medicines and test kits for family and friends on the mainland.

For all its efforts to quell the virus since it erupted in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, China may now pay a price for shielding a population that lacks “herd immunity” and has low vaccination rates among the elderly, analysts said.

“Authorities have let cases in Beijing and other cities spread to the point where resuming restrictions, testing and tracing would be largely ineffective in bringing outbreaks under control,” analysts at Eurasia Group said in a note on Thursday.

“Upward of 1 million people could die from COVID in the coming months.”

Other experts have put the potential toll at more than 2 million. China has reported just 5,235 COVID-related deaths so far, extremely low by global standards.

China’s stock markets and its currency fell on Thursday on concerns of the virus spread.

China reported 2,000 new symptomatic COVID-19 infections for Dec. 14 compared with 2,291 a day. The official figures, however, have become less reliable as testing has dropped. It also stopped reporting asymptomatic figures on Wednesday.

Concern for elderly 

China, which has said around 90% of its population is vaccinated against COVID, has now decided to roll out the second booster shot for high-risk groups and elderly people over 60 years of age. 

National Health Commission spokesperson Mi Feng said on Wednesday it was necessary to accelerate the promotion of vaccinations, according to comments reported by state media.

The latest official data shows China administered 1.43 million COVID shots on Tuesday, well above rates in November of around 100,000-200,000 doses a day. In total, it has administered 3.45 billion shots.

But one Shanghai care home said on Wednesday a number of its residents have not yet been vaccinated and considering their underlying medical condition, it has barred visitors and non-essential deliveries while stockpiling medicines, tests kits and protective gear.

“We are racking our brains on how to ensure the safety of your grandparents,” the Yuepu Tianyi Nursing Home wrote in a letter posted on its official WeChat account page.

Beijing has been largely resistant to western vaccines and treatments, having relied on locally-made shots. Pfizer’s oral COVID-19 treatment Paxlovid is one of the few foreign ones it has approved.

The treatment, however, has only been available in hospitals for high-risk patients, but signs have appeared in recent days that it may soon be made more widely available.

China Meheco Group Co Ltd’s stock jumped after it announced a deal to import the U.S. drugmaker’s treatment on Wednesday.

Economic conference

As the virus spreads, President Xi, his ruling Politburo and senior government officials began a two-day meeting to plot a recovery for China’s battered economy, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.

China’s economy lost more steam in November as factory output growth slowed and retail sales extended declines, both missing forecasts and clocking their worst readings since May, data on Thursday showed.

Economists estimate that China’s growth has slowed to around 3% this year, marking one of China’s worst performances in almost half a century. 
…

What’s a dust devil sound like on Mars? A NASA rover by chance had its microphone on when a whirling tower of red dust passed directly overhead, recording the racket.

It’s about 10 seconds of not only rumbling gusts of up to 25 mph (40 kph), but the pinging of hundreds of dust particles against the rover Perseverance. Scientists released the first-of-its-kind audio Tuesday.

It sounds strikingly similar to dust devils on Earth, although quieter since Mars’ thin atmosphere makes for more muted sounds and less forceful wind, according to the researchers.

The dust devil came and went over Perseverance quickly last year, thus the short length of the audio, said the University of Toulouse’s Naomi Murdoch, lead author of the study appearing in Nature Communications. At the same time, the navigation camera on the parked rover captured images, while its weather-monitoring instrument collected data.

“It was fully caught red-handed by Persy,” said co-author German Martinez of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

A 1-in-200 chance

Photographed for decades at Mars but never heard until now, dust devils are common at the red planet. This one was in the average range: at least 400 feet (118 meters) tall and 80 feet (25 meters) across, traveling at 16 feet (5 meters) per second.

The microphone picked up 308 dust pings as the dust devil whipped by, said Murdoch, who helped build it.

Given that the rover’s SuperCam microphone is turned on for less than three minutes every few days, Murdoch said it was “definitely luck” that the dust devil appeared when it did on Sept. 27, 2021. She estimates there was just a 1-in-200 chance of capturing dust-devil audio.

Of the 84 minutes collected in its first year, there’s “only one dust devil recording,” she wrote in an email from France.

A helicopter named ‘Ingenuity’

This same microphone on Perseverance’s mast provided the first sounds from Mars — namely the Martian wind — soon after the rover landed in February 2021. It followed up with audio of the rover driving around and its companion helicopter, little Ingenuity, flying nearby, as well as the crackle of the rover’s rock-zapping lasers, the main reason for the microphone.

These recordings allow scientists to study the Martian wind, atmospheric turbulence and now dust movement as never before, Murdoch said. The results “demonstrate just how valuable acoustic data can be in space exploration.”

On the prowl for rocks that might contain signs of ancient microbial life, Perseverance has collected 18 samples so far at Jezero Crater, once the scene of a river delta. NASA plans to return these samples to Earth a decade from now. Ingenuity has logged 36 flights, the longest lasting almost three minutes.
…

A hacker who reportedly posed as the chief executive of a financial institution claims to have obtained access to the more than 80,000-member database of InfraGard, an FBI-run outreach program that shares sensitive information on national security and cybersecurity threats with public officials and private sector individuals who run U.S. critical infrastructure.

The hacker posted samples purportedly from the database to an online forum popular with cybercriminals last weekend and said the asking price for the entire database was $50,000. 

The hacker made the disclosures to independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, who broke the story. The hacker called the vetting process surprisingly lax. 

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. Krebs reported that the agency told him it was aware of a potential false account and was looking into the matter. 

InfraGard’s members include business leaders, information technology professionals, and officials of the military, state and local law enforcement, and the government who are involved in overseeing the safety of such things as the electrical grid, transportation, health care, pipelines, nuclear reactors, the defense industry, dams, water plants and financial services. Founded in 1996, it is the FBI’s largest public-private partnership, with local alliances affiliated with all its field offices. It regularly shares threat advisories from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and serves as a behind-closed-doors social media site for select insiders. 

The database has the names, affiliations and contact information of tens of thousands of InfraGard users. Krebs first reported its theft on Tuesday. 

The hacker, going by the username USDoD on the BreachForums site, said on the site that records of only 47,000 of the forum’s members — slightly more than half — include unique emails. The hacker also posted that the data contained neither Social Security numbers nor dates of birth. Although fields existed in the database for that information, InfraGard’s security-conscious users had left them blank. 

However, the hacker, according to Krebs, claimed to have been messaging InfraGard members, posing as the financial institution’s CEO, to try to obtain more personal data that could be criminally weaponized. 

The AP reached the hacker on the BreachForums site via private message. The person would not say whether a buyer for the records had been found or answer other questions, but did say that Krebs’ article “was 100% accurate.” 

The FBI did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on how the hacker was able to trick it into approving the InfraGard membership. Krebs reported that the hacker had included a contact email address under the person’s control, as well as the CEO’s real mobile phone number, when applying for InfraGard membership in November. 

Krebs quoted the hacker as saying InfraGard approved the application in early December and the email account was used to receive a one-time authentication code. 

Once inside, the hacker said, the database information was easy to obtain with simple software script.
…

National Health Service nurses in Britain will strike on Thursday in their first-ever national walkout as a bitter dispute with the government over pay ramps up pressure on already-stretched hospitals at one of the busiest times of year.

An estimated 100,000 nurses will strike at 76 hospitals and health centers on Thursday, canceling thousands of non-urgent operations, such as hip replacements, and tens of thousands of outpatient appointments in Britain’s state-funded NHS.

Britain is facing a wave of industrial action this winter, with strikes crippling the rail network and postal service, and airports bracing for disruption over Christmas.

Inflation running at more than 10%, trailed by pay offers of around 4%, is stoking tensions between unions and employers.

Of all the strikes though, it will be the sight of nurses on picket lines that will be the standout image for many Britains this winter.

“It is deeply regrettable some union members are going ahead with strike action,” health minister Steve Barclay said.

“I’ve been working across government and with medics outside the public sector to ensure safe staffing levels — but I do remain concerned about the risk that strikes pose to patients.”

Considered a national treasure

The widely admired nursing profession will shut down parts of the NHS, which since its founding in 1948 has developed national treasure status for being free at the point of use, hitting health care provision when it is already stretched in winter and with backlogs at record levels due to COVID delays

Barclay said patients should continue to seek urgent medical care and attend appointments unless they have been told not to.

The industrial action by nurses on Thursday and December 20 is unprecedented in the British nursing union’s 106-year history, but the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said it has no choice as workers struggle to make ends meet.

Nurses want a 19% pay rise, arguing they have suffered a decade of real-terms cuts and that low pay means staff shortages and unsafe care for patients. The government has refused to discuss pay.

The government in Scotland avoided a nursing strike by holding talks on pay, an outcome that the RCN had hoped for in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but Barclay is not budging.

The government has said it cannot afford to pay more than the 4-5% offered to nurses, which was recommended by an independent body, and that further pay increases would mean taking money away from frontline services.

The RCN has accused the government of “belligerence.” It said as late as Tuesday that the strikes could still be stopped if the government was prepared to negotiate.

Some treatments exempt from strike

Some treatment areas will be exempt from strike action the RCN has said, including chemotherapy, dialysis and intensive care.

Polling ahead of the nursing strike showed that a majority of Britains support the action, but once the walkouts are underway, politicians will be closely monitoring public opinion.
…