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Journalism of Courage
Chinese respiratory disease experts have warned of an uptick in Covid-19 infections in the winter, urging the elderly and vulnerable populations to get vaccinated as soon as possible, according to the state-run Global Times newspaper.
Last month, China witnessed a small resurgence of Covid-19 infections with a total of 209 new severe cases and 24 deaths reported across the country in October, according to the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. The spike in the number of cases has been triggered by the strains of XBB variants, the government agency added.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, China followed a zero-Covid strategy — an extremely restrictive containment strategy with a fair degree of success. In December 2022, however, the country abruptly dropped the policy, leading to the emergence of massive waves of infections. This happened because a vast majority of China’s population had not been infected by the virus and hence had no immunity. Notably, vaccines are not known to prevent infection in very significant ways.
Therefore, fast-spreading variants like Omicron and XBB managed to infect a vast pool of susceptible people. It’s possible that a section of people in China are yet to build immunity against different variants, leading to a small increase in Covid-19 cases and deaths last month. The following months might also witness a similar pattern.
Another reason could be the efficacy of the two Chinese vaccines in use, Sinovac and Sinopharm. Like most of China’s data, there isn’t much clarity on the number of booster shots that have been administered. Vaccines become increasingly less effective over time, and in the absence of both a booster as well as natural immunity, the population becomes extremely vulnerable.
XBB is a recombinant of two Omicron sub-variants, BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75. Several studies have shown that XBB is more immune evasive — that is, it can circumvent immunity from vaccination-induced infection — and has a growth advantage over other currently circulating variants of Omicron. What this essentially means is that the variant is more likely to cause reinfection or breakthrough infections in people.
This, however, does not mean that the variant can lead to more severe disease, hospitalisations, or deaths. For instance, in India, one of the XBB variants, XBB.1.16, was reported in samples from five states, four of which were seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases in March this year.
