The World Health Organization has reiterated the need for China to share more data on its explosive COVID-19 outbreak, while praising the United States for “radical transparency” in its efforts to battle a new sub-variant.
Key points:
- The World Health Organization says COVID-19 deaths in China remain heavily under-reported
- Meanwhile, the US has been praised for its transparency as Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.5 spreads
- WHO’s director-general says the world cannot “close its eyes and hope this virus will go away”
It has repeatedly voiced concerns that China’s official statistics are not showing the true impact of its current surge in COVID-19.
“WHO still believes that deaths are heavily under-reported from China,” its emergencies director, Michael Ryan, said.
He blamed Beijing’s narrow definition of what constitutes a COVID-19 death, and also pointed to “the need for doctors in the public health system to be encouraged to report these cases, and not discouraged”.
In contrast, he hailed the cooperation of authorities in the US, where the new Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.5 is spreading rapidly.
“There’s been radical transparency on behalf of the United States, in terms of engaging with the WHO regarding the data and the impact of that data,” Dr Ryan said.
Maria Van Kerkhove — the WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19 — said Washington had supplied virtually all the data available so far on XBB.1.5, which has proven the most-transmissible form of the virus to date.
The subvariant — detected in 38 countries — clearly has a “growth advantage” over other forms of the virus, she told reporters.
It is also believed to be better at dodging immunity protections from prior infection or vaccination.
“We don’t yet have data on severity,” she added.
World ‘cannot close its eyes’
Dr Ryan warned that, despite increased collaboration with China, the WHO still did not have “adequate information to make a full, comprehensive risk assessment”.
China abruptly dropped its “zero-COVID” approach last month after three years of enforcing some of the harshest anti-pandemic restrictions in the world.
That unleashed a wave of infections that has packed hospitals and overwhelmed crematoriums.
However, according to official figures, only 37 COVID-related deaths have been recorded in China since last month out of a population of 1.4 billion.
Faced with such discrepancies, the WHO has expressed sympathies with countries that have opted to demand COVID-19 tests from travellers from China.
This includes the Australian government, which introduced a new policy on January 5 requiring people coming into the country from China, Hong Kong and Macau to take a pre-departure COVID-19 test and to provide a negative result before departing.
“In the absence of data, countries have made a decision to take a precautionary approach and [WHO has] said that that is understandable in the circumstances,” Dr Ryan said.
Chinese officials, however, do not appear keen on changing their methodology.
“I don’t think it is necessary to look into the cause of death for every case at present,” the head of a Chinese government-appointed expert panel, epidemiologist Liang Wannian, said.
“The key task during the pandemic should be treatment.”
The United Nations health agency also expressed concern that China, and many other countries, were not focusing enough on the testing and sequencing needed to help detect possible new variants of the virus.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that, since the peak of the Omicron wave last year, the number of sequences being shared had dropped by more than 90 per cent, and the number of countries sharing sequences had fallen by a third.
He said that, with COVID-19 continuing to kill between 10,000 and 14,000 people each week since September, “the world cannot close its eyes and hope this virus will go away”.
AFP
