China registered a explosion of infections after lifting its strict sanitary measures at the beginning of December, raising fears that the world’s most populous country would be fertile ground for new, more transmissible or more serious strains of the virus.
Several countries imposed restrictions on visitors from China, citing the lack of transparency about the magnitude of the epidemic, which drew the ire of Beijing.
But according to the study published by The Lancet, conducted by Chinese researchers based on 413 samples from Beijing sequenced between November 14 and December 20, “there is no evidence that new variants have emerged” in that period.
More than 90% of the cases were of the BF.7 and BA5.2 subvariants of omicron, already surpassed in Western countries by more transmissible subvariants.
BF.7 accounted for three quarters of the samples, while more than 15% were from BA5.2, according to the study.
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“Our analysis suggests that two known subvariants of omicron were primarily responsible for the outbreak in Beijing and likely throughout China,” George Gao, the study’s lead author and a virologist at the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.
Wolfgang Preiser and Tongai Maponga, virologists at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who were not involved in the study, They warned that the investigation only covered a few weeks after China lifted its zero-Covid measures.
“If new lineages emerge in the course of contagion, the study would probably have been done too early to detect them,” they noted in a commentary in The Lancet.
China also dramatically reduced testingwhich could affect the results, which only cover Beijing and not the entire country, they added.
However, they welcomed the “much needed information from China”.
The entrance Study rules out new variants in China in order to “zero covid” was first published on newspaper TODAY.
