China has mostly abandoned reporting cases of COVID-19, but evidence of its massive wave of infections is quickly appearing at airports outside its borders.
A study published Thursday in the journal Eurosurveillance found that 42% of the 149 passengers on board the Dec. 26 flight from the southeastern city of Wenzhou to Milan, Italy, tested positive for COVID-19 upon arrival. showed.
The Italian researchers behind the study also looked at test-positive rates on three other flights from the eastern Chinese city to Italy, two to Milan and two to Rome, at the end of December. Overall, 23% of his passengers (126 of 556 passengers) on the four flights tested positive for his SARS-CoV-2. His other three flights had positive rates of 19%, 11% and 14%.
Passengers were tested with either a rapid antigen test or a PCR test. A positive antigen test was confirmed by PCR testing. The test most likely caught mildly or asymptomatic patients as well as those who had recently recovered. PCR tests can remain positive for weeks after infection.
Similar to Italy’s data, The Washington Post reported about a week ago data from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing 23% of short-term visitors to South Korea from China (314 out of 1,352 were tested at the airport). reported to have seen He tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 between 2 and 6 January.
This rate betrays an outbreak in China, which is expected but poorly documented. When China abruptly ended its zero-corona policy last month, it stopped mass testing and largely gave up reporting cases. Meanwhile, the virus is tearing apart a population that, as Italian researchers note, is a “highly vaccinated but uninfected population.”
Current models estimate that there are 1.5 million new infections in China every day, and over 1 million deaths could occur in the coming weeks. Health experts are particularly concerned that the disease will spread during the Lunar New Year holiday on January 22, when tens of millions of people in China travel to see their families for the festivities. is expected to transfer high infection from large cities to more vulnerable rural areas.
Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, told The Washington Post that infection rates so far “are fully consistent with predictions that a large proportion of the population in major cities is already infected.” rice field.
One piece of good news is that Italian researchers have sequenced the virus from 61 passengers and found no new or surprising variants in their sampling. Sampling found the omicron sublineages BA.5.2, BF.7 and his BQ.1.1 seen elsewhere. This data is consistent with those reported elsewhere and from China.
