{"id":596051,"date":"2023-01-10T05:49:16","date_gmt":"2023-01-10T11:49:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/10\/what-chinas-covid-crisis-means-for-the-rest-of-the-world\/"},"modified":"2023-01-10T05:49:16","modified_gmt":"2023-01-10T11:49:16","slug":"what-chinas-covid-crisis-means-for-the-rest-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/10\/what-chinas-covid-crisis-means-for-the-rest-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"What China\u2019s Covid Crisis Means for the Rest of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The fear is that the sudden spread of Covid through a new population with relatively little prior exposure to the virus will lead to the emergence of a new \u201csupervariant\u201d\u2014one that has the potential to change the face of the pandemic like the Alpha, Delta, and Omicron forms of the virus did before. But whether there\u2019s a significant risk of this happening isn\u2019t clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2020, Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Cambridge, published a\u00a0paper in the journal\u00a0Nature<\/em><\/a> demonstrating that chronic SARS-CoV-2 infections\u2014where the virus lingers and multiplies inside the body of someone whose immune system is compromised\u2014provide the virus with a greater opportunity to evolve. \u201cA billion new infections means more opportunity for more chronic infections,\u201d says Gupta. \u201cYou\u2019re upping the numbers game in\u00a0favor of the virus to make new, potentially problematic variants.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Cowling argues that because the level of immunity is much lower in China than the rest of the world, it will be relatively easy for the virus to spread through the population without needing to evolve. He says that if a new supervariant were to emerge, it might be more likely to come from North America or Europe, where more people have built up immunity through both vaccination and prior infection.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy gut instinct is that the risk of a major new variant is probably not higher in China,\u201d Gupta says. \u201cIn the UK, for example, if Covid is going to continue circulating, it\u2019s got to find a new direction and way around the immunity from previous waves of Omicron and all its subvariants, whereas in China it\u2019s quite happily spreading anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if a new supervariant does appear, scientists are unsure whether it would be more or less virulent than what\u2019s already out there. Last year, Gupta and his colleagues\u00a0showed that<\/a> Omicron is less lethal than its predecessors because it does not infect lung cells as efficiently. \u201cInstead it infects nasal cells,\u201d he says. \u201cOmicron chose a pathway that exists in the upper airways, so it\u2019s less severe and transmits very, very well.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Gupta cautions that this doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the whole trajectory of the virus has shifted to being less severe, and says it is still biologically plausible for an immune-evasive version to emerge that is more virulent. \u201cThere\u2019s no evolutionary reason why the virus couldn\u2019t go back to being quite pathogenic,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Whatever happens, it\u2019s possible that it will take some time before the full consequences of China\u2019s Covid surge becomes apparent. While some global consortiums such as\u00a0GISAID<\/a> in Germany are still dedicated to tracking coronavirus mutations, in general, countries around the world have scaled down their efforts to sequence viral samples, making it harder to track new variants and how they are being introduced to different countries. \u201cPeople have realized how much it costs, and it\u2019s not just in the UK and the US\u2014it\u2019s happened globally,\u201d says Gupta. \u201cSo for that reason, we are maybe at our most vulnerable at the moment, in a relative sense, just because we don\u2019t know what\u2019s out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

For much of Europe and North America, Balloux describes Covid as currently being comparable to many other common respiratory infections, although that picture could change if a dangerous new supervariant were to emerge. The alarming spikes of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths of 2020 and 2021 have been replaced by a steady, more insidious death toll.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Between January and November 2022,\u00a041,620 people<\/a> in England perished from Covid. Most are believed to have been elderly people who were already frail and suffering from multiple underlying health conditions, or people whose immune systems were suppressed\u2014either because of illness or medicines they were taking\u2014though no precise data exists. In comparison, a particularly severe flu season tends to result in around\u00a030,000 fatalities<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are very few young healthy people who die from Covid now in the UK or the US,\u201d says Balloux. \u201cWhat Covid does at the moment is essentially add to the stress of other issues\u2014people who already have underlying problems, and the fact that in the UK, the hospital system can\u2019t cope. It\u2019s amplifying these underlying risks.\u201d China\u2019s Covid surge, at least for now, will do little to change this already-existing threat that the virus poses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n David Cox<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fear is that the sudden spread of Covid through a new population with relatively little prior exposure to the virus will lead to the emergence of a new \u201csupervariant\u201d\u2014one that has the potential to change the face of the pandemic like the Alpha, Delta, and Omicron forms of the virus did before. But whether<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":596052,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22042,32379,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chinas","category-covid","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}