From Reuters:
“Don't press 'pandemic panic button' scientists caution on
China pneumonia report”
Leading scientists urged caution over fears of another
pandemic on Thursday after the World Health Organization requested more
information from China on a rise of respiratory illnesses and pneumonia
clusters among children. "We have to be careful," said Marion
Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who advised the WHO on COVID-19. "We really
need more information, particularly diagnostic information."
Concerns were first sparked internationally by an alert
published on Tuesday by the monitoring service ProMED, part of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases. It called for more information
about "undiagnosed pneumonia - China (Beijing, Liaoning)".
The standard wording of the alert echoed the first-ever
notice about what would become COVID-19, sent on Dec. 30 2019:
"Undiagnosed pneumonia - China (Hubei)." Scientists said the
similarity of the two alerts had stirred as yet unfounded worries the surge may
be caused by another emerging pathogen that could spark a pandemic. They said
based on the information so far, it was more likely to be a rise in other common
respiratory infections like flu, as was seen in many parts of the world after
COVID lockdowns were lifted. It could also signal a resurgence of COVID itself.
The WHO always requests information from countries when
undiagnosed or unknown diseases are reported, which happens fairly regularly.
However, it does not always put out a press release about doing so, as it did
on Wednesday.
Brian McCloskey, a public health expert who also advised WHO
on the pandemic, said: "What we are seeing is WHO's International Health
Regulations system in action", referring to the rules governing how
countries work with WHO on potential outbreaks. "I am not going to push
the pandemic panic button on the basis of what we know so far, but I will be
very keen to see the response to WHO from China and see the WHO’s assessment
following that," he said.
Both the WHO and China have faced questions over transparency
during the early days of COVID. WHO has also since criticised China for
withholding data about infections and deaths when it lifted its
"zero-COVID" measures, as well as about the origins of the pandemic.
China has 24 hours to respond to the WHO under the
regulations. But some said it was unclear if the illnesses reported were
actually undiagnosed. The story which sparked the ProMED alert came from FTV
News in Taiwan on Tuesday. In China itself, there has been a lot of recent
coverage of a rise in respiratory illnesses, including among children. The
authorities there have attributed it to the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions
and the circulation of viruses like influenza as well as mycoplasma pneumoniae,
a common bacterial infection that typically affects younger children. "There
is a plausible hypothesis that this could be what we have seen in other parts
of the world when restrictions were lifted," said Koopmans, reflecting the
views of all of the scientists Reuters contacted.
Virologist Tom Peacock from Imperial College London, who has
closely tracked the emergence of new coronavirus variants, said there were good
tools available to "pretty rapidly" pick up emerging influenza or
coronaviruses, so it seemed unlikely that this had happened under the radar. "(I)
suspect it may end up being something more mundane or a combination of things -
say COVID, flu, RSV - but hopefully we'll know more soon," he said.
^ Everyone in the World has a right to be concerned with what
is going on in China right now (concerned, but not panicked.)
China lied to the World about Covid-19 back in 2019-2020 and
allowed its Citizens to travel around the World spreading Covid to every corner,
causing a Worldwide Pandemic where 6,981,263 People have died of Covid
(including 1,183,379 Americans.)
The WHO and most of the World did little to nothing to find
out what was going on in China in 2019 and China was and still is very secretive
about Covid and everything else inside their country.
While we should not panic about this new illness trend in
China we definitely should not simply rely on the Chinese or the Chinese
Communist Party to keep the World informed on what is actually going on – been there
and done that. ^
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