Since February 1, 228 locally transmitted Covid-19 cases were reported in Mainland China, and separately more than 350 athletes and Olympic personnel testing positive upon arrival at Beijing Airport. On the opening day of the Olympics, 45 cases were reported, including those detected upon arrival and those through testing in the bubble. The “closed loop management, keeping Olympic arrivals strictly separated from the outside world, has so far succeeded in preventing outbreaks linked to the Olympics in the community.
Hong Kong reported 614 new cases on February 7, after more than 300 two days in a row in the city's fifth Covid wave. Chinese University’s Professor Kwok Kin-on predicts that the number of daily confirmed case will soon reach 1,000. Patients with mild or no symptoms will be sent to the government’s Penny Bay quarantine camp on Lantau island to free up hospital beds while allowing close contacts of carriers to self-isolate at home. Many of the recent patients were infected during Lunar New Year gatherings, while the rest were cleaners, security guards and construction workers who were frequently tested.
The Hong Kong government must tackle gaps in its Covid-19 strategy, stockpile more medicine and better allocate resources or run the risk of Hong Kong being overwhelmed by an expected wave of infections, health experts have warned, as the daily number of confirmed and suspected cases reached record highs. The ability of authorities to carry out contact tracing urgently needed to be expanded as clusters continued to mushroom across the city and more test kits should be distributed in the community, they said. Dr Siddharth Sridhar, Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Microbiology, said it was safe to assume the fifth wave was going to get worse as the number of untraceable cases continued to rise during the Lunar New Year holiday.
The city of Baise in Guangxi – with a population of 3.5 million – asked all its residents to stay at home starting on February 7, the first working day after Chinese Spring Festival holiday, to fend off the latest local Covid-19 flare-up. Guangxi reported 99 locally transmitted Covid-19 cases from February 5 to 7, all in Baise, which is located about 120 kilometers from China-Vietnam border.
As long as China has no new measures to prevent imported strains of the coronavirus from triggering large-scale transmission and with no effective way to contain the epidemic, the country will not adjust its dynamic zero-tolerance policy for now, because relying only on vaccines cannot contain Covid-19, Wu Zunyou, Chief Epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times. Many countries in Europe have already reached a vaccination rate of 70%, and some countries like Germany, France and the UK more than 70%, but the occurrence of Omicron with breakthrough cases challenges the concept of herd immunity. This means if you want to end the epidemic through building up herd immunity but mutated strains can evade immunity, this concept will no longer apply, Wu noted.
China has moved a step closer to developing a home-grown mRNA vaccine with the publication of early trial results for its prime candidate, ARCoV. No serious adverse events were recorded in the phase 1 clinical trial, but scientists said it was too early to judge its success. Large-scale trials of the vaccine – jointly developed by the Academy of Military Science, Walvax Biotechnology and Suzhou Abogen Biosciences – have been delayed since last year, as it has become more difficult to recruit unvaccinated volunteers for phase 3 trials. So far, China has relied on inactivated vaccines – which use traditional technology but are less effective against the Omicron and Delta variants – to protect its population against the virus. No overseas-developed mRNA vaccines have been approved by the Chinese regulator. Shanghai-based Fosun Pharmaceuticals has exclusive rights to distribute the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in Greater China, but supply has been restricted to Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan while it awaits regulatory approval for Mainland China.
A new study by Chinese researchers from Nankai University in Tianjin and the National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention supports the theory that the coronavirus may have passed from humans to mice and then – after multiple mutations – made the reverse journey becoming the Omicron variant. Five mutations of the Omicron variant are identical to one found in mouse lung samples, according to the paper. The origin of Omicron remains unknown as it contains over 50 mutations, many of which have not been found in other previous variants. Many scientists agree that it did not evolve from Delta or other recent variants. Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has been found in a wide range of animals like dogs and cats, farmed mink and ferrets, and zoo animals. Hong Kong recently culled 2,000 hamsters, and Hong Kong University scientists found the world’s first known instances of hamster-to-human transmission.
This overview is based on reports by the China Daily, Global Times and South China Morning Post.
