INDIAN CRISIS ‘MAY SLOW’ GLOBAL BORDER OPENING
Chinese epidemiologist now believes some nations will be more cautious about letting people in from overseas, especially governments in the region
India’s Covid-19 crisis has cast a shadow on the world reopening, despite a global ramping up in vaccinations, a leading Chinese epidemiologist says.
Zhang Wenhong, director of the department of infectious diseases at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, said he had been expecting a global opening up of countries after sufficient vaccination as the pandemic was brought under control. However, the massive surge in India had changed his thinking.
“Our projection on the global epidemic would have been a bit more optimistic, but that time frame now looks like it may have to be extended,” Zhang said in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV. “It looks like the world may open up in the future in a conditional way, within regions, rather than globally.”
India has recently been reporting more than 400,000 new Covid19 cases and 4,000 deaths a day, bringing the total number of cases in the nation to at least 22 million and the death toll to more than 246,000 by yesterday.
The country’s health system has been overwhelmed and many specialists suspect actual death and case numbers are larger than those officially reported.
An editorial published in The Lancet said Covid-19 deaths in India could potentially reach a “staggering” 1 million by August, citing an estimate by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a research centre at the University of Washington.
Other countries have been sending aid to India but Zhang said the help was limited and the country needed to rely on itself to contain the coronavirus.
“The prevention and control of an epidemic in a country or region depends on three main aspects: the ability of public health governance; the degree of cooperation among the residents; and whether the science and technology can keep up,” Zhang said, referring to the need for ample vaccination before outbreaks and prompt testing and isolation during them.
“It doesn’t mean the public health experts in India don’t know how [to contain the epidemic], but it can’t necessarily be achieved. We can only hope, pray or wish that Indian people can soon overcome the hurdle.”
India has administered about 160 million doses of vaccines – one is the locally produced AstraZeneca vaccine and another was developed by Bharat Biotech in India. But only about 2 per cent of the population has received the full two doses. That is seen as far from sufficient to stop viral transmission in the country.
Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, said the spread of the more contagious B. 1.617 variant of the virus, which was first detected in India in October, may be dodging vaccine protections and contributing to the crisis.
The dire situation in India and neighbouring Nepal, which also saw cases skyrocketing in recent weeks, have put China, which has seen imported cases from India in seven provinces, on high alert for local outbreaks caused by people from overseas.
Respiratory disease specialist Zhong Nanshan called on the country to remain vigilant even though it had almost eliminated locally transmitted Covid-19.
“More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, China, as the world’s most populous country, has withstood the test of the first phase of the pandemic, but we mustn’t ignore that the global epidemic situation is still very serious,” Zhong said.
“The current vaccination rate in China is still not high and far from what is needed to achieve universal immunisation, so we still need to pay great attention to preventing the risk of importing the epidemic.”
In an interview with People’s Daily, Li Lanjuan, a prominent infectious disease specialist at the Zhejiang University school of medicine, said: “Our country has a large population, long borders and a high degree of openness with people entering China from overseas all the time, so we still have to keep up epidemic prevention at the borders and never let down our guard.”