According to the institute’s calculations, the cases in China are expected to reach their peak around April 1, while the deaths during the same period will be about 322,000. About a third of China’s population will have been infected by the virus by then, according to IHME director Christopher Murray.
The sudden lifting of strict containment measures to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus could result in an explosive increase in cases and more than a million deaths by 2023, suggests a new model from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), based in the USA.
According to the institute’s calculations, the cases in China are expected to reach their peak around April 1, while the deaths during the same period will be about 322,000. About a third of China’s population will have been infected by the virus by then, according to IHME director Christopher Murray.
The national health commission — China’s health ministry — has not reported any deaths from COVID-19 since restrictions began to be lifted. Officially, the most recent deaths due to the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 were announced on December 3rd. The toll of the victims of the pandemic, officially always, is at 5,235 dead in the country of 1.41 billion inhabitants.
The easing of restrictive measures, which were among the strictest in the world, began in December after unprecedented protests. There is now a surge in cases and there are fears that the virus will spread to the population during Lunar New Year celebrations next month.
“No one thought they would implement zero COVID (policy) for so long,” Mr Marry commented yesterday, unveiling the new model.
The policy of wiping out cases was effective in controlling earlier variants and subvariants of SARS-CoV-2, but the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant and its subvariants made its continuation impossible, he said.
The University of Washington Institute in Seattle relied on data and information about the recent Omicron outbreak in Hong Kong.
“Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China has rarely reported deaths (due to COVID-19). That’s why we studied Hong Kong, to get an idea of the mortality rate,” explained Mr Marry.
For its predictions, IHME also took into account data on vaccination rates released by Chinese authorities and made assumptions about how local authorities would react if cases increased.
Other experts estimate that 60% of China’s population will be progressively infected, peaking in January. This threatens in particular the most vulnerable groups of the population: the elderly and people with co-morbidities.
They are concerned about the high number of people belonging to high-risk groups, the use of less effective vaccines and the low vaccination coverage of citizens over 80, by definition the most vulnerable.
Experts at the University of Hong Kong predict that the lifting of all restrictive measures and the opening of all provinces simultaneously in December and January 2023 will result in deaths due to COVID-19 reaching 684 per day during this period. In their study, if no action is taken, especially if there is no booster dose campaign, the deaths could reach 964,000.
Another study, published in July in the journal Nature Medicine by researchers at the School of Public Health at Fudan University in Shanghai, predicted that deaths would reach 1.55 million over a six-month period if measures were lifted all at once due to a wave of Omicron. It assumed that intensive care unit (ICU) demand would be 15.6 times higher than existing capacity at the peak of the wave.
Yazog Huang, a health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank, pointed out that China has 164 million diabetics, a risk factor that doesn’t exactly bode well, and 8 million citizens over 80 who are unvaccinated.
Chinese authorities are encouraging citizens to receive booster doses using newer vaccines, but are reluctant to use preparations made abroad, he said.
The Chinese Ministry of Health reported yesterday that vaccinations are being intensified, while the stock of artificial respiration support machines and essential drugs is increasing.
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