Shanghai, home to the world’s largest container shipping port, began a two-part lockdown on March 28 and has yet to announce when the restrictions will be lifted.
Yang Jiancheng | China Optical Group | Getty Images
The World Health Organization said Monday it is monitoring a major surge in COVID-19 cases in mainland China, an outbreak that local officials have attributed to the more contagious drug omicron BA.2.
doctor. Kate O’Brien, director of the WHO’s Immunization and Vaccine Program, said the agency is in contact with public health authorities in China about the resurgence of Covid. WHO officials have said they need to monitor the effectiveness of regional lockdowns and vaccinations in the country, but they don’t have enough information.
He said during a press briefing from the Geneva headquarters organization.
The comments come as China battles the worst outbreak of the Covid-19 virus since the virus was first detected in Wuhan more than two years ago. Although the number of cases is down in most countries, mainland China reported 1,184 new asymptomatic and 26,411 asymptomatic cases on Sunday — the most cases recorded in a single day so far, according to China’s National Health Commission.
To contain the outbreak, the nation has brought back lockdowns in some parts of the country and online learning for some students, especially in Shanghai where more than 26,000 cases were reported on Sunday.
Almost all of Shanghai’s 26 million residents are still on lockdown about a week after the city’s two-phase lockdown ended. The citywide lockdown includes work-from-home orders and the suspension of travel and public transport bookings.
It’s part of China’s zero-tolerance Covid policy on using regional lockdowns to contain the outbreak, which helped the country recover from the initial wave of the pandemic in early 2020.
doctor. Alejandro Craviotto, chair of the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Vaccination, said it “would be important” to see if these lockdowns were fully effective in containing the latest outbreak, particularly with BA.2 spreading rapidly across the country. He noted that the new sub-variant is more transmissible than the original Covid strain, although its infections are mainly mild or asymptomatic.
Craviotto added that the World Health Organization lacks sufficient information about the Covid vaccines being administered in China.
The group recently reviewed data for an mRNA vaccine developed by CanSino Biologics, a clinical-stage vaccine company in China, according to a WHO press release. However, the press release said the Craviotto group “will not make any recommendations until such time as the product is listed by the World Health Organization for emergency use.”
“Until we see the data actually come out, we won’t be able to make any further comments,” Craviotto said, referring to China’s “drastic” lockdown measures.
CanSino Biologics has yet to be administered to Chinese nationals. The vaccine developer said last week that the mRNA vaccine had been approved by China’s medical products regulator to enter clinical trials.
Chinese officials said last month that the Covid vaccines already administered in China had been updated to combat omicron and other circulating strains, according to Bloomberg. China’s vaccines are inactivated, which means they work by using dead or weakened viruses to produce an immune response.
But preliminary laboratory studies have found that vaccines developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech and Sinopharm provide fewer protective antibodies against omicron than mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, Bloomberg reports.
As of April 5, 88.5% of China’s population had received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine, according to Our World In Data.