A Chinese senior health adviser is predicting 65 million COVID-19 cases per week in China by June.
The new wave has been fueled by the XBB variant since April, Time.com reported.
Since pivoting to "living with the virus" policy in December, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention stopped updating weekly infections. The sudden relaxation of anti-epidemic protocols led to an estimated 37 million new infections a day weeks later, the news outlet reported.
By January, experts estimated nearly 80% of the 1.4 billion populace had already been infected in this first wave.
For a second wave, since April, data from Zhong Nanshan — a respiratory disease doctor who was among the first to confirm COVID's easy transmissibility — showed the XBB variant is expected to cause 40 million infections weekly by May, going up to 65 million in June.
Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Time.com although only mass testing can detect the true extent of the COVID surge, the population has obtained some immunity from the preceding wave.
"We shouldn't worry if China doesn't worry," Huang told Time.com. "Public health officials try to downplay the severity of this second wave. The Chinese people seem to have learned to co-exist with the virus. There's that social adaptability."
With the virus continuing to circulate in China along with a waning public immunity, the possibility of a new, more dangerous sub-variant emerging still exists, warned Catherine Bennett, an epidemiologist at Deakin University in Australia, the news outlet reported.
"It's somewhat reassuring, thus, now a year and a half into Omicron, that we haven't seen a major shift that's either undermined our immunity, our testing capability, and, importantly, antivirals," she said.
Another factor affecting the prognosis for China is its willingness to share information.
Vincent Pang, an assistant professor at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, says data on the spread and impact of COVID will only be of use if shared with others on a global, well-regulated platform, so that these countries can perform their own risk assessment.
"Infectious disease does not respect geographical boundaries," Pang told Time.com. "No one is safe until everyone is ready and safe."
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