2023-11-24 09:46:50
In China not even OMS It seems like they want to repeat past mistakes. Both have already been main actors, under international scrutiny, in a health catastrophe. Their lack of coordination was notable during the beginning of the pandemic, especially when the coronavirus that the propitiation did not even have a name. The secrecy of the Asian power and the complacency of the global health agency was not a good combination. But the pandemic left several lessons. One of them was that, if any alert now goes out, any doubt about a possible new virus circulating through the vast Chinese territory, all communication channels are activated quickly and transparently.
This makes sense that the WHO made a public statement on Wednesday about its request for information to nice regarding the increase in respiratory diseases and reported clusters of pneumonia in children. As explained by the agency HIM, these requests, pulling the mechanism of the International Health Regulations, are routine when it comes to undiagnosed or unknown diseases. And they happen regularly.
But sources consulted by this newspaper emphasize that what is not usual is to make public a statement in this regard, knowing that, after the devastating passage of the pandemic, any news about a strange disease in China will always have a great impact. media, as has happened this week.
Less than 24 hours after the WHO request, the Chinese health authorities have responded: they assure that they have not detected “any unusual or new pathogen.” That is the conclusion of a report that includes epidemiological, clinical data and laboratory analysis.
On Thursday night, via the Xinhua news agency, the National Health Commission of China He acknowledged that he was “paying a lot of attention” to overcrowding in children’s hospitals, especially in the north of the country. Chinese health authorities have attributed the increase in respiratory illnesses to mycoplasma pneumonia (a common bacterial infection that generally affects younger children), influenza and Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid.
Videos continue to circulate on social networks from Beijing, specifically from the emergency room of the Pediatric Institute, crowded with parents with children in their arms. Some complain that they have been waiting for many hours to be served. Similar scenes are also experienced more than 600 kilometers to the north, in the province of Liaoning, where striking images of children with intravenous lines emerge in the hallways of medical centers.
But the truth is that the so-called infusion therapies are quite common in the Chinese health system, even abusive according to several controversies about it that have arisen in other years. These days a photograph of some children doing their homework while they had an IV in place went viral. The Chinese media recalled that there are several hospitals in the country that have a “study area”with desks and chairs, next to the infusion rooms, because it is common to resort to this treatment for any patient with pneumonia.
The majority opinion of epidemiologists is that China is experiencing its first winter since the lifting of pandemic restrictions and that natural levels of immunity to respiratory viruses are lower than normal, experiencing large waves of infections, starting for the flu. In the case of children, the long confinements caused a delay in the age at which the youngest children are first exposed to common seasonal viruses.
“This is simply a relatively large seasonal increase, in part because there is a bit of immunity debt from the poor winter increases of the last three years,” he says. Ben Cowlingepidemiologist of the University of Hong Kong. “There is a plausible hypothesis that this could be what we have seen in other parts of the world when restrictions were lifted. I suspect it may end up being something more mundane or a combination of, for example, Covid, flu or RSV,” he maintains. Marion KoopmansDutch virologist who was on the WHO team that traveled to Wuhan to try to decipher the origin of Covid.
Another explanation that experts propose is that the massive and sudden Covid infections that occurred at the beginning of this year, when China ended the confinement policy, caused people to be more vulnerable to other respiratory infections.
On November 13, Chinese authorities explained at a press conference that the drastic increase in infections among minors was due to mycoplasma pneumonia, which mainly affects children and the most common symptoms are headache, sore throat, cough. and fever. In October, several Chinese state media had already reported the increase in these cases.
But the international focus was not on China until the WHO made its request public after a report by ProMed, the outbreak surveillance network that first alerted the world about Covid, which cited “undiagnosed pneumonia” concentrated in the north of the Asian giant. Despite the media hype, the WHO made it clear from the beginning that these cases cited by ProMed – whose first source was an article in a Thai newspaper that spoke of a mysterious pneumonia – could be associated with the outbreak reported by the Chinese authorities.
China, the WHO and the origin of the pandemic
At the end of January 2020, when China had already closed Wuhan due to the first known outbreak of Covid and the virus was spreading around the world, the WHO publicly praised Beijing for its rapid response to the new coronavirus, thanking it for its transparency and that it had immediately shared the genetic map of the SARS-CoV-2.
A few months later, an investigation by the Associated Press (AP) agency revealed that the Government of the Asian giant was actually not so willing to share key information during the first critical days of the pandemic. AP had access to several recordings of meetings of WHO technicians in Ginebra. They privately complained that, during the week of January 6, 2020, China was not sharing the data necessary to assess the risk of the virus to the rest of the world. Starting with the delay in disseminating the genome for more than a week after three Chinese laboratories had already deciphered it.
In the first months of the pandemic, from Washington, the then president Donald Trump He does not cease his criticism of the WHO, calling it a “puppet serving China’s interests.” There was never any evidence that this was so. But, as the AP recordings pointed out, the organization continued to praise China’s management when it knew that the authorities of the Asian country had not made available all the timely information to study the real impact.
The WHO, which has also criticized Beijing for hiding death data when it lifted all the barriers of its extreme zero Covid policy, has maintained these years that it works closely with the Chinese authorities to reveal the origin of the coronavirus. Even the international organization based in Geneva sent a team with the best virus hunters in the world to Wuhan to try to decipher a mystery for which we still do not have answers.
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