- China’s unparalleled virus wave is fading.
- COVID deaths nationwide have dropped by over 80%.
- The city would survey thousands of citizens in February and March.
BEIJING – Beijing has reached “temporary herd immunity,” and its COVID outbreak is nearing a conclusion, according to a city health official, another indicator that China’s unparalleled virus wave is fading.
Since the ruling Communist Party abruptly reversed its zero-COVID policy last month, a flood of cases has swept through the world’s most populous nation.
The spike crammed hospitals and crematoriums in major cities, including Beijing, though the scope of the outbreak is difficult to confirm because official statistics are thought to represent just a small percentage of the total number of cases.
However, there are signs that the increase is slowing, with authorities reporting last week that the number of daily COVID deaths nationwide has dropped by over 80% since the beginning of January.
Beijing’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention
Wang Quanyi, deputy head of Beijing’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told local media Tuesday that the metropolis of 22 million has “established temporary herd immunity protection”.
“This wave of infections in Beijing has already peaked and is now coming to an end,” the state News quoted Wang as saying.
The capital was “currently in a state of sporadic infections” with the virus exhibiting a “relatively low risk of transmission”, Wang said.
According to official data, the number of persons seeking treatment for flu-like diseases at major Beijing hospitals dropped by more than 40% between January 23 and 29, compared to the previous week.
According to Wang, a national decrease in the number of illnesses showed that the end of the Lunar New Year break would “not have too much of an impact” when people returned to Beijing from other regions of the country.
He went on to say that the city would survey thousands of citizens in February and March to see how many have COVID antibodies in their blood plasma.
The survey will “comprehensively assess Beijing’s state of coronavirus infection” and “provide a reference for optimizing resource allocation in the future,” Wang said.
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