Officials from the World Health Organization said today, Wednesday, that data from China shows that no new variant of the Corona virus has been found there, but the data also provides an underestimated number of deaths from the rapid outbreak of the disease in the country, and the organization confirmed that Corona is a global concern again. US President Joe Biden also expressed concern about China's handling of the virus outbreak.
"We believe that the current figures published by China do not reflect the reality of the impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions and intensive care units, especially in terms of deaths," said Michael Ryan, who is in charge of managing health emergencies at the World Health Organization, at a press conference in Geneva.
In a statement, the World Health Organization expressed its concern about the increase in coronavirus infections in China, and added that it calls on Beijing to provide it quickly and permanently with data on hospital work and the state of public health.
The United Nations organization indicated that more than 770 types of viral sequences had been submitted from China as of yesterday, Tuesday, confirming that there was no new variant according to the available viral data.
The organization added that the recent outbreak of Covid-19 in China was mostly caused by the Omicron “PA5.2” and “PF7” mutants, and that the two mutations together caused 97.5% of all local infections, based on the analysis of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. and prevention of more than 2,000 human genome codes.
Omicron is the dominant mutant based on a recent monitoring of the genetic sequence, confirming what scientists have already said and alleviating fears at the present time about the emergence of a new mutant.
On the other hand, the World Health Organization criticized China's new "too narrow" definition of death from Covid-19, stressing that the statistics are not consistent with the resurgence of the epidemic in the country.
The organization was reviewing data provided by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a day after WHO officials met with Chinese scientists.
China is currently witnessing the worst epidemic wave after the authorities abruptly lifted - in early December - most of the strict health measures to combat Covid-19, but despite this, the country reported a small number of deaths related to Covid-19 after a controversial change in the methodology. Calculating deaths.
Many funeral homes and hospitals said that they are suffering from high demand for their services, while international health experts expect at least one million deaths in China this year, and yet China announces numbers that do not exceed 5 cases per day of Covid-19 deaths.
China counts Covid-19 deaths only for cases in which people died from breathing problems after tests confirmed that they had the virus, which means that a large number of deaths are not listed as being caused by Covid-19.
Overseas health officials are struggling to determine the extent of the disease and how to prevent it from spreading, and more and more countries are introducing measures such as pre-departure COVID-19 tests for people arriving from China, measures that have been criticized by Beijing.