GENEVA, Dec 22 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The head of the World Health Organization said he was “very concerned” about an unprecedented wave of Covid cases in China, urging Beijing to provide detailed information about the severity of the situation.
“WHO is very concerned over the evolving situation in China,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a weekly news conference, appealing for detailed information on disease severity, hospital admissions and intensive care
requirements.
“WHO is supporting China to focus its efforts on vaccinating people at the highest risk across the country, and we continue to offer our support for clinical care and protecting its health system”, he added.
Since 2020, China has imposed strict health restrictions as part of a so-called “zero Covid” policy. But the government ended most of those measures without notice in early December amid growing public exasperation and a significant impact on the economy.
The number of cases has since soared, raising fears of a high mortality rate among the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable.
Chinese authorities said on Tuesday that only those who had directly died of respiratory failure caused by the virus would now be counted under Covid death statistics.
The change in the criteria for recording virus deaths means most are no longer counted, and China said on Wednesday that not a single person had died of Covid-19 the previous day.
WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan stressed the need for more vaccinations: “We’ve been saying this for weeks that this highly infectious virus was always going to be very hard to stop completely, with just public health and social measures”.
“And most countries have really transitioned to a mixed strategy”.
“Vaccination is the exit strategy in that sense from the impact of a wave of Omicron”, the prevalent Covid variant.
Meawhile, Germany has sent its first batch of BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines to China to be administered initially to German expatriates, government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said, the first foreign coronavirus vaccine to be delivered to the country.
“The Chinese government informed Germany today that for the time being German citizens in China may be given the BioNTech vaccines,” he said, adding that “around 20,000 Germans would benefit” from the shipment.
He said that Germany was negotiating to win access for “other so-called expatriates” from other countries.
“In return, Chinese citizens in Europe, in Germany, may receive the Chinese vaccine Sinovac, if they so choose,” Hebestreit said.
It was not immediately clear whether other shipments would follow from Berlin. — NNN-AGENCIES
