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Covid-19 is now no more serious than a seasonal cold and there is no need to panic", Guangzhou health authorities sought to assure the public, as pandemic controls were relaxed in several districts of the southern Chinese factory hub despite rising caseloads. The officials underline reduced virulence of Omicron and its subvariants.
• Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan has said Omicron is more transmissible but less deadly, signalling a new chapter in China’s pandemic response.
• As different cities around China have eased testing requirements in line with more “targeted & optimized” anti-Covid measures (see today’s subpost for an overview), it is clear that the messaging about the current perceived state of the virus is changing.
• Hospitals in many provinces in China have announced that their nucleic acid testing services will no longer be available to the general public without a medical need. More information in today's subpost.
Several major cities nationwide have eased testing requirements in line with more “targeted” anti-Covid measures urged by the central leadership, as the country battles its largest outbreak since the spring.
In a public service message broadcast on Friday, a group of health experts in Guangzhou said symptoms caused by the Omicron subvariants behind the current wave were very mild and similar to those for seasonal colds. “The virulence of the new coronavirus [Omicron] has now evolved to the level of the seasonal flu, and some are even less virulent than the flu, so you really don’t need to panic,” said Tang Xiaoping, director of the No 8 People’s Hospital in Guangzhou and head of the national key clinical department of infectious diseases.
Guangzhou reported 4,922 infections on Saturday. Total cases in the wave since late October have reached 162,700, with 90 per cent of them asymptomatic. Only four cases were classified as “severe and critical”, and no deaths were recorded, Guangzhou health commission deputy director Zhang Yi said on Friday. “This shows that the virulence of the Omicron variant is significantly lower than previous original strains and other mutant strains,” she said.
“This is not only the characteristic of the Omicron mutant strain, but also related to the improvement of the population’s vaccination immunity and the active prevention measures adopted by our country.” Tang noted that more than 90 per cent of infected patients had no symptoms and mild cases received the same treatment as that for flu. “Many of my friends were also infected with the coronavirus, but they soon recovered without special treatment. So I’d like to tell the general public that you should not panic too much,” he said.
Zhang Zhongde, director of the Guangdong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said Omicron mainly affected only the upper respiratory tract. “The symptoms of the Omicron can be said to be ‘flu-like’, and milder than some severe flu cases,” he said.
Guangzhou authorities have asked hospitals and pharmacies to let people in as long as they can show a green health code on China’s app-based Covid tracking system. But patients seeking hospitalisation and their attendants are still required to provide a negative PCR result from within the previous 24 hours.
Source: SCMP
