China’s new Covid wave expected to peak in June at 11 million cases a week

Surge being fuelled by Omicron variant XBB likely to be much smaller than winter outbreak, according to health data firm Airfinity
But it ‘could still lead to a large number of deaths because of the size of China’s ageing population’, epidemiologist says

Coronavirus China

Yvonne Sun

Published: 5:00pm, 8 Jun 2023

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China’s latest Covid-19 wave is likely to peak this month at 11 million cases a week, according to UK-based health data firm Airfinity.

The new outbreak – driven by the Omicron variant XBB – is expected to be far smaller than the massive wave of infections that ripped through the country in winter after Beijing ended its zero-Covid restrictions.

“Our modelling estimates the wave will peak at the beginning of June at around 11 million per week, with 112 million people being infected during this resurgence,” Airfinity said.

That compares to Chinese respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan’s estimate in May that cases could reach 65 million a week by the end of June – six times higher than Airfinity’s projection.

Zhong did not say if his estimate included asymptomatic cases, but Airfinity said its model was a forecast of symptomatic cases only.

Respiratory expert Zhang Nanshan said cases could reach 65 million a week by the end of June. Photo: Handout

There is no official data available on the scale of the current wave. The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) stopped releasing weekly data such as positive test rates and fever clinic visits in early May when the World Health Organization said Covid-19 no longer constituted a global health emergency.

About 80 per cent of the country’s 1.4 billion population was infected with the virus during the winter outbreak, according to a report in China CDC Weekly in April. Zhong also said last month that more than 1 billion people had been infected in that wave.

According to Airfinity, China’s latest outbreak is expected to cause less than 1 million deaths, based on death rates in similar countries that have already been through Covid waves caused by XBB.

That figure is significantly lower than the 1.3 million to 2.1 million lives estimated by Airfinity to have been lost in the winter outbreak – though the official data put Covid-related deaths at 83,150 from mid-December to early February.

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Dr Tishya Venkatraman, a Covid-19 epidemiologist from Airfinity, said China’s second wave was less severe than the first because there is increased immunity among the population from the winter outbreak, and a greater uptake of booster shots.

But she said there could still be a high death toll.

“Even though the ongoing wave is likely to be smaller, it could still lead to a large number of deaths because of the size of China’s ageing population,” Venkatraman said.

“We have seen this in Japan, where the latest wave caused a significant number of deaths despite having high vaccine coverage and underlying population immunity from previous waves.”