BEIJING: A city health official said on Tuesday that Beijing has reached “temporary herd immunity” and that its COVID outbreak is about to end. This is another sign that China’s unprecedented virus wave is slowing down.
Since the ruling Communist Party abruptly ended its zero-COVID policy last month, the world’s most populous nation has seen a flood of cases.
Despite the fact that official data is believed to represent only a small fraction of the actual number of cases, the outbreak’s scale is difficult to determine due to the overcrowding of hospitals and crematoriums in major cities like Beijing.
However, there have been signs that the increase is beginning to slow down. Last week, authorities reported that the number of daily COVID deaths nationwide had decreased by nearly 80% since the beginning of January.
Tuesday, Beijing’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention deputy director Wang Quanyi told local media that the 22 million-person city had “established temporary herd immunity protection.”
According to the Beijing News, Wang stated, “This wave of infections in Beijing has already peaked and is now coming to an end.”
Wang stated that there was a “relatively low risk of transmission” of the virus and that the capital was “currently in a state of sporadic infections.”
According to official data, between January 23 and 29, major Beijing hospitals saw a 40 percent drop in the number of patients seeking treatment for flu-like diseases.
According to Wang, the end of the Lunar New Year holiday would “not have too much of an impact” as people returned to Beijing from other parts of the country due to a decline in the number of infections nationwide.
He went on to say that thousands of residents would be surveyed by the city in February and March to find out how many of them had antibodies against COVID in their blood plasma.
According to Wang, the survey will “provide a reference for optimizing resource allocation in the future” and “comprehend Beijing’s state of coronavirus infection in its entirety.”
