Sunday, March 13, 2022

Worst Outbreak of Covid in China for the last 2 years

China is seeing the worst outbreak of Covid than it has in 2 years. In Beijing, there were 3,400 cases in one day, a number doubled from the day before. This has caused China to start shutting down schools and businesses. There were even entire cities shut down due to this sudden outbreak. China has typically been fairly good at maintaining the virus, however the recent spike in asymptomatic cases and the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant has caused maintaining the virus much more difficult. Some people are saying that the response to this outbreak hasn’t been fast enough, however what is more likely is that we do not know enough about Omicron yet to effectively stop it.

One thing we have been talking about in class is the potential of a vaccine that is more specifically targeting the Omicron variant. The vaccine that we are currently using will protect us from the original strain of Covid, however there have been new variants since then that the vaccine does not include (e.g Delta and Omicron). Furthermore, it is likely that there will be more variants as time goes on. This new vaccine that is more geared towards protecting against Omicron could really help decrease these high transmission rates. The only problem is that by the time we do have a vaccine for Omicron, it is likely that it will be too late and there will already be another variant of Covid that is circulating. SO, while it will be good to have a more updated vaccine, we need to find a way to make vaccines faster so that we can work on preventing transmission before it happens rather than stopping transmission rates after it has already gotten really bad. 


China Records Nearly 3,400 Daily Virus Cases In Worst Outbreak In 2 Years

-Lauren Burch

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