Amid a massive surge in COVID19 cases, the authorities in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, have asked most of the primary schools to go online and stop in-person attendance from December 19, 2022.

According to an online statement, the authorities also asked kindergartens and childcare centres to shut all in-person classes from Monday.

Meanwhile, the Washington-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has projected that lifting of curbs could result in an explosion of cases and over a million deaths through 2023.

It may be recalled that the World Health Organisation said that the surge in cases was not related to the recent opening up, and the country was witnessing a surge long before.

WHO's emergencies director Dr Mike Ryan said during a media briefing in Geneva that the disease was spreading intensively because what he believed to be control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease.

“And I believe China decided strategically that was not the best option anymore, he added.

Additionally, in a recent study published in the pre-print server Medrxiv, the researchers from Hong Kong University predicted that the country could see a surge in the number of cases during the upcoming holiday season in December 2022-January 2023, a period that marks the Chinese Lunar New Year.

“Although the surge of disease burden posed by reopening in December 2022 – January 2023 would likely overload many local health systems across the country, the combined effect of vaccination, antiviral treatment and public health surveillance measures could substantially reduce COVID19 morbidity and mortality as China transits from dynamic-zero to normality,” the researchers wrote.

The modelling study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that unless supportive measures are taken along with the lifting of containment measures, the country could see a mortality of 684 per million.

According to them, however, before reopening administering booster vaccine doses and providing antivirals in time could reduce the transmissibility by 47-69%.

“With fourth-dose vaccination coverage of 85% and antiviral coverage of 60%, the cumulative mortality burden would be reduced by 26-35% to 448-503 per million, compared with reopening without any of these interventions,” the researchers wrote.

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