WHO chief ‘very concerned’ about Covid situation in China

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appeals for detailed data on disease severity, hospital admissions and intensive care requirements.

A fever patient is taken to a Beijing hospital on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says he is “very concerned” about an unprecedented wave of Covid cases in China as Beijing changed the criteria so that most virus deaths are no longer counted.

Dr Tedros on Wednesday appealed for detailed information on disease severity, hospital admissions and intensive care requirements as the health body urged Beijing to accelerate vaccination of the most vulnerable.

“WHO is very concerned over the evolving situation in China, with increasing reports of severe disease” Dr Tedros told a weekly news conference in Geneva.

“WHO is supporting China to focus its efforts on vaccinating people at the highest risk across the country, and we continue to offer our support for clinical care and protecting its health system.”

Since 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping has imposed strict health restrictions as part of a “zero Covid” policy. But the government ended most of those measures without notice this month after mass protests and a massive slowing of the economy.

The number of cases has since soared, raising fears of a high mortality rate among the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable.

Chinese authorities said on Tuesday that only those who had directly died of respiratory failure caused by the virus would now be counted under Covid death statistics. Previously, people who died of an illness while infected with the virus were counted as a Covid death. This way of recording Covid deaths accounts for huge numbers of fatalities in most other countries.

The change in the criteria for recording virus deaths means most are no longer counted, and China said on Wednesday that not a single person had died of Covid-19 the previous day.

WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan stressed the need for more vaccinations: “We’ve been saying this for weeks that this highly infectious virus was always going to be very hard to stop completely, with just public health and social measures. And most countries have really transitioned to a mixed strategy. Vaccination is the exit strategy in that sense from the impact of a wave of Omicron,” the prevalent Covid variant.

In China hospitals are struggling, pharmacy shelves have been stripped bare and crematoriums are overwhelmed in the wake of the government’s sudden decision to lift years of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing.

China had recorded a total of seven deaths – all in Beijing – since its decision to lift its zero-Covid policy, but removed one death from its official tally on Wednesday.

“At present after being infected with the Omicron variant, the main cause of death remains underlying diseases,” Wang Guiqiang of Peking University First Hospital said at the National Health Commission on Tuesday. “Old people have other underlying conditions, only a very small number die directly of respiratory failure caused by infection with Covid.”

One expert said that because the Omicron variant does not affect the lungs as much as other strains of Covid-19, the changing definition will mean a great many more cases will go unrecorded.

“The definition that focuses on respiratory failure (which develops when the lungs can’t get enough oxygen into the blood) will miss a large number of Covid deaths,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at New York’s Council on Foreign Relations. “The new definition is a reversal of the international norm adopted since mid-April during the Shanghai outbreak, which counts a Covid death as anyone who died with Covid.”

AFP