New Coronavirus News from 27 Mar 2022

Shanghai starts China’s biggest COVID-19 lockdown in 2 years [The Seattle Times, 27 Mar 2022]

BEIJING (AP) — China began its most extensive lockdown in two years Monday to conduct mass testing and control a growing outbreak in Shanghai as questions are raised about the economic toll of the nation’s “zero-COVID” strategy.

China’s financial capital and largest city with 26 million people, Shanghai had managed its smaller, past outbreaks with limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces where the virus was spreading. But the citywide lockdown that will conducted in two phases will be China’s most extensive since the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, confined its 11 million people to their homes for 76 days in early 2020.

Shanghai’s Pudong financial district and nearby areas will be locked down from Monday to Friday as mass testing gets underway, the local government said. In the second phase of the lockdown, the vast downtown area west of the Huangpu River that divides the city will start its own five-day lockdown Friday.

Residents will be required to stay home and deliveries will be left at checkpoints to ensure there is no contact with the outside world. Offices and all businesses not considered essential will be closed and public transport suspended.

Already, many communities within Shanghai have been locked down for the past week, with their housing compounds blocked off with blue and yellow plastic barriers and residents required to submit to multiple tests for COVID-19. Shanghai’s Disneyland theme park is among the businesses that closed earlier. Automaker Tesla is also suspending production at its Shanghai plant, according to media reports.

Panic-buying was reported on Sunday, with supermarket shelves cleared of food, beverages and household items. Additional barriers were being erected in neighborhoods Monday, with workers in hazmat suits staffing checkpoints.

BEIJING (AP) — China began its most extensive lockdown in two years Monday to conduct mass testing and control a growing outbreak in Shanghai as questions are raised about the economic toll of the nation’s “zero-COVID” strategy.

China’s financial capital and largest city with 26 million people, Shanghai had managed its smaller, past outbreaks with limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces where the virus was spreading. But the citywide lockdown that will conducted in two phases will be China’s most extensive since the central city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, confined its 11 million people to their homes for 76 days in early 2020.

Shanghai’s Pudong financial district and nearby areas will be locked down from Monday to Friday as mass testing gets underway, the local government said. In the second phase of the lockdown, the vast downtown area west of the Huangpu River that divides the city will start its own five-day lockdown Friday.

Residents will be required to stay home and deliveries will be left at checkpoints to ensure there is no contact with the outside world. Offices and all businesses not considered essential will be closed and public transport suspended.

Already, many communities within Shanghai have been locked down for the past week, with their housing compounds blocked off with blue and yellow plastic barriers and residents required to submit to multiple tests for COVID-19. Shanghai’s Disneyland theme park is among the businesses that closed earlier. Automaker Tesla is also suspending production at its Shanghai plant, according to media reports.

Panic-buying was reported on Sunday, with supermarket shelves cleared of food, beverages and household items. Additional barriers were being erected in neighborhoods Monday, with workers in hazmat suits staffing checkpoints.

That requires lockdowns and mass testing, with close contacts often being quarantined at home or in a central government facility. The strategy focuses on eradicating community transmission of the virus as quickly as possible.

While officials, including Communist Party leader Xi Jinping have encouraged more targeted measures, local officials tend to take a more extreme approach, concerned with being fired or otherwise punished over accusations of failing to prevent outbreaks.

With China’s economic growth already slowing, the extreme measures are seen as worsening difficulties striking employment, consumption and even global supply chains.

Shanghai’s announcement of the dates when the two lockdowns would be lifted appeared to show a further refinement in China’s approach. Previous citywide lockdowns had been open-ended.

Although China’s vaccination rate is around 87%, it is considerably lower among older people.
National data released earlier this month showed that over 52 million people aged 60 and older have yet to be vaccinated with any COVID-19 vaccine. Booster rates are also low, with only 56.4% of people between 60-69 having received a booster shot, and 48.4% of people between 70-79 having received one.

Older and unvaccinated people are more likely to become seriously ill if they contract the virus.

China continues to battle ‘severe and complex’ Covid outbreak, cases shoot up in UK | Top points [India Today, 27 Mar 2022]

Even as the Covid-19 situation in India remains under control, nations like China and South Korea are facing outbreaks of the infection. The UK too is seeing an uptick in Covid-19 cases.

India logged 1,660 new Covid-19 cases in 24 hours on Saturday, taking the active case tally to 16,741. With a lull in cases, India is limping (or rather, running) back to almost complete normalcy. On Sunday, scheduled international passenger flights resumed after more than two years.

However, this is not the case across the globe. Some parts of the world are, yet again, reeling under the pressure of high Covid-19 caseloads.

The World Health Organisation earlier reported that the number of new coronavirus cases increased two weeks in a row globally.

Here are the top Covid-19 developments from across the world.

CHINA
China continues to battle its worst Covid-19 outbreak, driven by the Omicron variant. On Friday, health officials called the situation “severe and complex”.

The Chinese mainland reported 1,280 locally transmitted Covid-19 cases and 55 imported cases in 24 hours on Friday. More than 20 provinces and cities in the country have imposed travel bans and lockdowns.

The country has counted more than 56,000 cases since March 1, according to national health officials. The numbers do not include Hong Kong, which tracks its Covid-19 data separately.

The city reported 10,401 new cases on Friday, continuing a downward trend. The city has recorded over 1 million cases in the latest surge.

The situation in Hong Kong has highlighted the importance of vaccinating elderly people. A vast majority of Hong Kong's Covid-19 deaths have been among those who are not fully vaccinated, with many in the elderly population.

UK
Coronavirus cases in the UK have shot up by nearly a million in a week to reach 4.26 million cases up from 3.3 million the week before, according to latest official data released on Friday.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) attributed the sharp rise in cases to the Omicron BA.2 variant, an even more transmissible form of the highly transmissible Omicron. The number of people in hospital with the virus is also on the rise, though cases of severe illness remain low.

SOUTH KOREA
South Korea registered 3,18,130 new coronavirus infections and 282 deaths on Sunday. The daily case count in the country has remained below 4 lakhs for the fourth day running. The tally has been declining since Wednesday, when 4.9 lakh cases were reported in 24 hours.

The surge in the country is attributable to the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

US
With a rise in cases in parts of the world, experts are anxious about a surge in the US as well.

However, scientists have said that the wide availability of vaccines and treatments puts the nation in a better place than when the pandemic began, and that monitoring has come a long way. Additionally, US cases, hospitalisations and deaths have been falling for weeks.

That said, the highly transmissible BA.2 variant is beginning to account for a growing share of US cases -- more than one-third nationally. Small increases in overall case rates have been noted in New York.

INDIA
The cumulative Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in the country crossed 183 crore on Saturday, the Union health ministry said.

More than 1.20 crore vaccine doses have been administered in the 12-14 years age group so far, the ministry said.

The countrywide vaccination drive was rolled out on January 16 last year.

New Coronavirus News from 26 Mar 2022

Brazil's COVID-19 guidelines: political hijack of public health [The Lanvet, 26 Mar 2022]

Authored by Luis C L Correia, Cristina Sette, Marisa Santos, Carlos A S Magliano and Fotini S Toscas

On Jan 20, 2022, in an unprecedented move, the Brazilian Secretary for Science, Technology, and Innovation overrode the Brazilian guideline for COVID-19 outpatient treatment. The guideline was originally demanded by the Ministry of Health, developed by a team of academics, specialists, and health technology analysts, according to GRADE-ADOLOPMENT methodology.1

The guideline, which recommended against the use of drugs without scientific proof of efficacy, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin,2 was finally approved by the National Committee for Health Technology Incorporation (CONITEC) in December, 2021. In the Brazilian public health system, CONITEC has a central role in evaluating and recommending technology implementation on the basis of the scientific paradigms of efficacy, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been endless and polarised debate regarding the use of unproven therapies for COVID-19 in Brazil, which, combined, are known as COVID Kit. COVID Kit was popularised by a populist federal government and, unfortunately, was adopted by some members of the medical community who failed to recognise the principles of scientific reasoning in medical decision making.3

Paradoxically, the anti-scientific decision against the guideline was taken by a secretary of science. The decision was accompanied by a long note of justification, which made use of epidemiological jargon to define a logic that clearly violated basic scientific principles. First, it suggested that statistical significance should not be a necessary condition for establishing drug efficacy; second, it proposed Bradford Hill criteria as a means to claim drug efficacy in the absence of controlled empirical observations, such as large and low risk of bias clinical trials; and finally, it concluded in favour of the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, while claiming that vaccination has no demonstrated effectiveness.4

It is natural for humans to suffer from intrinsic bias in the process of judgement. However, the present situation seems to be the result of a strongly polarised environment that led to this unfortunate conspiracy to replace scientific criteria with political interests.
Brazil has been an example of two opposite phenomena: the tendency of a populist government to undermine science, and the resistance of scientists under a strong democratic regimen that supports freedom of speech. We believe that with the support of the international scientific community, the latter will prevail.

References
1. Schünemann HJ, Wiercioch W, Brozek J et al.
GRADE Evidence to Decision (EtD) frameworks for adoption, adaptation, and de novo development of trustworthy recommendations: GRADE-ADOLOPMENT.
J Clin Epidemiol. 2017; 81: 101-110
2. Ministry of Health
Diretrizes Brasileiras para tratamento medicamentoso ambulatorial do paciente com COVID-19.
http://conitec.gov.br/images/Consultas/Relatorios/2021/20211112_Diretrizes_Brasileiras_para_Tratamento_Medicamentoso_Ambulatorial_do_Paciente_com_Covid-19.pdf
3. Correia LC, Lopes JRP, Garcez FB, Campion EL, Barcellos G and Barreto-Filho JA
Physicians' preference towards the non-evidence based hydroxychloroquine treatment for COVID-19: the pandemic effect.
Evidence. 2020; 2: 10-15
4. National Commission for Health Technology Incorporation
Fundamentação e decisão acerca das diretrizes terapêuticas para o tratamento farmacológica do COVID-19.
http://conitec.gov.br/images/Audiencias_Publicas/Nota_tecnica_n2_2022_SCTIE-MS.pdf

Shanghai rules out full lockdown despite sharp rise in Covid cases [The Guardian, 26 Mar 2022]

Concern about economy leads city to try targeted approach with rolling restrictions of individual neighbourhoods

Shanghai has recorded a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases, but officials have ruled out a full lockdown over the damage it would do to the economy.

Millions of Chinese in affected areas have been subjected to city-wide lockdowns by an Omicron-led outbreak that has sent daily case counts creeping ever-higher, though they remain insignificant compared with other countries.

Shanghai, however, has aimed to ease disruption with a more targeted approach marked by rolling 48-hour lockdowns of individual neighbourhoods and large-scale testing while largely keeping the metropolis of 25 million people running.

At a daily Shanghai press conference on Saturday, officials alluded to the importance of avoiding a full lockdown of the huge port city.

“If Shanghai, this city of ours, came to a complete halt, there would be many international cargo ships floating in the East China Sea,” said Wu Fan, a medical expert with the city’s pandemic taskforce.

“This would impact the entire national economy and the global economy.”

Wu made the comments as city officials also announced that they would begin handing out self-testing kits to Shanghai residents, in the latest sign that the government was expanding its pandemic response.

The north-eastern province of Jilin also said that it had begun distributing 500,000 rapid-antigen kits.

Shanghai and Jilin have been the areas hardest hit by the outbreak, which took off in early March.

China had largely kept the coronavirus – which first emerged in the city of Wuhan in late 2019 – under control through its strict zero-tolerance measures.

But that top-down approach is increasingly being questioned amid concerns over the economic impact and public “pandemic fatigue”, especially considering Omicron’s less severe symptoms.

The National Health Commission announced two weeks ago that it would introduce the sale in China of rapid antigen self-test kits for the first time, and they have begun to appear on pharmacy shelves.

But Saturday’s announcements appeared to mark their first wide-scale use as part of official pandemic control measures.

China on Saturday reported 5,600 new confirmed domestic transmissions, most of them asymptomatic.

Chinese authorities had watched nervously as a deadly Hong Kong Omicron surge sparked panic buying and claimed a high toll of unvaccinated elderly in the southern Chinese city.

Its subsequent spread in mainland China has posed a dilemma for authorities wrestling with how forcefully they should respond.

On Wednesday, Shanghai infectious disease expert Zhang Wenhong, a top doctor in the city’s pandemic fight, called for balancing antivirus measures with maintenance of “normal life”.
The comments in his widely followed blog indicated growing official tolerance for voices who question the lockdown approach.

Frustration with Covid response grows in China as daily cases near 5,000

Shanghai’s softer strategy has so far failed to stop cases from rising, and the localised lockdowns have provoked grumbling online and a run on groceries in some districts.
Shanghai reported another steep rise in new local transmissions to 2,269 – about 40% of the national total.