China abandoned its Wuhan pneumonia eradication policy, which caused a humanitarian crisis, but lacked an emergency strategy to trigger a tsunami of epidemics, which has attracted global attention. Experts warn that the new outbreak in China shows no signs of slowing down and that in addition to potentially killing up to a million people in the coming months, the new viral strain could spread to many countries and affect the entire world. British media have described that this could trigger a strain of the ‘doomsday variant’ virus, leading the world back to the source of the outbreak.
Beijing’s abrupt cancellation of its controversial zero-clearing policy last month has wreaked havoc in the epidemic, according to the UK’s “Daily Mail” report: hospitals have been overwhelmed and even morgues are full. The outside world believes that the main reason behind this wave of epidemics is that Chinese people generally do not believe in the efficacy of domestic vaccines in China, resulting in low vaccination rates and lack of natural immunity from previous infections. The World Health Organization (WHO) has admitted that the dire situation in China shows that the pandemic is not over yet.
Martin McKee, public health expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, warned: “China has kept the death rate at a very low level, but has failed to use this time to increase vaccination rates, especially for the elderly population. This is bad for China: impact, high death rate, political instability, also impact on the world, there is a risk of new variants of the virus emerging and disruption of supply chains.”
Peter Hotez, a virologist at Baylor University in Texas, pointed out that the increase in cases in China could lead to the emergence of new variants of the virus, much like the emergence of the “big devil” Delta variant virus. or undervaccinated populations could facilitate the emergence of new variants of the virus, similar to the emergence of Delta among unvaccinated populations in India in early 2021.”
The British “Daily Mail” reported that data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this year showed that when the Delta virus strain first appeared, 16 people died for every 1,000 people infected. in the United States. a variant virus strain similar to Delta is found, it will be a “doomsday variant” virus strain, returning the world to the origin of the epidemic.
Some scholars also pointed out that the BF.7 strain of the Omicron variant virus that caused the outbreak in China has not shown a dominant advantage in the West, so there is no need to worry too much. “The situation in China does not pose a substantial additional risk to other countries. After all, most of the rest of the world has mixed immunity,” said Paul Hunter, a public health expert at the University of East Anglia.
