How Bad Is China’s Covid Outbreak? It’s a Scientific Guessing Game.

How the Chinese public perceives the threat of the outbreak will also be important for its trajectory. Even if people decide to start taking more precautions for only a short period, scientists said, it could mean the difference between hospitals being able to treat their sickest patients or being completely overwhelmed.

The vaccination rate in the country is another major variable. While 90 percent of the population has received two shots, the booster rate is much lower for older Chinese people. The World Health Organization has said three shots are crucial with Chinese vaccines that use inactivated virus.

Extra protection from additional doses should arrive in less than two weeks for people with previous shots, said James Trauer, an expert on modeling infectious diseases at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. And he noted that the size of the country means that the outbreak will not reach everyone at the same time, giving some places extra time to get more people inoculated.

Scientists are studying transportation patterns to understand how fast the outbreak might spread, but the picture isn’t clear.

The Hong Kong scientists, in their recent study, analyzed passenger data from a handful of Beijing subway lines. The information, they said, suggested that mobility in the city had dropped to low levels as people stayed home to protect themselves against the virus.

But Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said there were some indications that at least in big cities, foot traffic was picking up and restaurants were getting busier.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/health/china-covid-outbreak-predictions.html