New projections from the US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said that China’s sudden lifting of strict restrictions to combat COVID-19 could lead to an explosion in the number of cases and the death of more than a million people over the next year.
According to forecasts, the number of cases in China will reach its peak in early April, and deaths will reach 322,000.
The director of the institute, Christopher Murray, said that “about a third of the Chinese population will have been infected by that time.”
China’s National Health Commission has not recorded any official virus deaths since the restrictions were lifted.
The last official deaths were announced on December 3, while the total deaths from the pandemic reached 5,235.
China lifted some of the world’s toughest anti-COVID restrictions in December after unprecedented public protests, and is now seeing a surge in infections, with fears the coronavirus could infect hundreds of millions during next month’s Lunar New Year holiday.
“No one thought they would stick to zero Covid the way they did,” Murray said on Friday when the institute’s forecast was released online.
He added that the “zero Covid” policy may be effective in controlling the virus, but the high transformability of the Omicron mutant makes it impossible to continue applying that policy.
Other experts expect that about 60 percent of the Chinese population will eventually be infected with the virus, and infections are expected to peak in January, and they will be in the most vulnerable groups such as the elderly and others.
A document published on Wednesday on the medical website MedRexiv showed that disease experts at the University of Hong Kong expect the simultaneous lifting of restrictions and reopening of provinces in December 2022 and January 2023 will result in 684 deaths per million people during that time. Time frame.
Based on China’s population of 1.41 billion and without measures such as mass vaccination, the number could reach 964,400 deaths.