Virus World

The new wave goes against the grain of Chinese health officials’ estimate that COVID-19 had peaked in April. L ast week when a Chinese senior health adviser projected 65 million COVID-19 cases per week in China by June, some health experts sounded the alarm. China has been facing a new COVID-19 wave fueled by the XBB variant since April. Data from Zhong Nanshan—a respiratory disease doctor who was among the first to confirm COVID-19’s easy transmissibility—provided a rare insight into how the disease could possibly be spreading in China almost six months after Beijing abruptly ended its draconian zero-COVID strategy. Since pivoting to “living with the virus” policy from early December, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention stopped updating weekly infections. But the sudden relaxation of anti-epidemic protocols also led to an estimated 37 million new infections a day weeks later. By January, experts said they believed almost 80% of China’s 1.4 billion population had already been infected in this first wave.

For the second wave since April, Zhong’s modeling revealed that the XBB variant is expected to cause 40 million infections weekly by May, going up to 65 million in June. This goes against the grain of Chinese health officials’ estimate that the wave had peaked in April. In Beijing, the number of new infections recorded between May 15 and 21 grew four times in four weeks. While Zhong said vaccines targeting this specific variant will be rolled out soon, the projection of new COVID-19 infections nonetheless frazzled markets. China’s collective immunity has always been in question: a refusal to use foreign-sourced mRNA vaccines meant the public got inoculated against COVID-19 with a jab that proved less effective in preventing infection during early clinical trials, say researchers, and the stringent virus containment protocols restricted the possibility of developing natural immunity. Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells TIME that although only mass testing can detect the true extent of the COVID-19 surge, the population has obtained some immunity from the preceding wave.

Different choices that were available and plausible could have been made at several crucial turning points.  Zeynep Tufekci's Latest:  Dive deep into the internet, technology, politics and society with Zeynep Tufekci's latest column as soon as it’s published. This article is part of Times Opinion’s reflection on the two-year mark of the Covid pandemic. Read more in a note from Alexandra Sifferlin, Opinion’s health and science editor, in our Opinion Today newsletter.