A Tale of Two Outbreaks

 

"First there was one asymptomatic infection at the airport in Nanjing. The next day, there were more than a dozen. By the end of that week in July, daily infections had climbed to nearly 50, suggesting exponential spread across more than 1,000 kilometers. In less than three weeks, daily cases ballooned to more than 100, scattered across half of the nation. Then it ended, almost as quickly as it began. The number of infections dropped to single digits the next week amid tightening curbs, then zero. More testing will show if it has been vanquished."

"The blazing spread of the delta variant across the country became the biggest test of China’s COVID control model. Ultimately it penetrated nearly 50 cities across 17 provinces and reintroduced the virus to "Wuhan, which had been COVID-free for over a year."

Still, China eliminated the virus in about a month, roughly the same time it took to quell previous outbreaks including one at the start of 2021 that totalled some 2,000 cases. In comparison, cities in Australia have undergone repeated lockdowns, keeping more than half of the country’s 26 million people confined to their homes, without gaining control of the virus. In the U.S., which has never succeeded in containment, relying instead of vaccination, booster shots are slated to roll out next month to shore up protection against its delta resurgence."

Fortune magazine 

Waiting for Covid-19 testing in Nanjing. About 200 cases were reported in an outbreak centered on the city.   Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

"The vaccines that are currently approved by the WHO all provide significant protection against severe disease and hospitalization from all the variants, including the Delta variant."

"We are fighting the same virus but a virus that has become faster and better adapted to transmitting amongst us humans -- that's the change."

Mike Ryan, top emergency expert World Health Organization

At the end of July China suddenly found itself trying to control the most threatening COVID-19 outbreak it had been forced to confront in months in a return of COVID infections, thanks to the Delta variant. At the same time the United States plans to intensify its efforts to control the Delta strain believed on ample evidence to be more contagious than the original coronavirus.

 

An official lockdown was mandated for hundreds of thousands of people living in Jiangsu province when a cluster of infections was identified in its provincial capital of Nanjing. The infections were tracked to airport workers who had cleaned a plane arriving from Russia in late July. It took little time before infections were detected in Beijing and five provinces. By standards other than China's the number of infections were modest. But the speed of the spread was not.

Across China a total of 206 infections were linked to the original cluster which became the largest in the country geographically in several months. Two locally transmitted cases were found in Beijing's Changping district which spurred lockdown in nine housing communities with a total population of 41,000 people. At the same time a document from the U.S.Centers for Disease Control spoke of the Delta variant causing more severe illness than earlier variants, spreading as readily as chickenpox.

U.S. health officials, points out the document, must "acknowledge the war has changed", and be prepared to intensify efforts to halt the spread. The U.S. struggles to persuade Americans to become vaccinated and adapt to prevention measures like wearing face masks amidst surging cases -- and new research which suggests that those who are vaccinated can also spread the virus.

Three quarters of those who were infected with COVID-19 at public events in a town in Massachusetts had been fully inoculated against COVID. According to the study, vaccinated individuals reflected similar virus loads as those who were unvaccinated; unlike other variants, vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant are able to transmit the virus, the CDC revealed.

 

Authorities in China tested millions of people after an outbreak spread to 15 provinces   Getty Images

 

This realization caused the health agency to change its guidelines recommending that vaccinated Americans once again wear face masks where transmission levels are high. "Given higher transmissibility and current vaccine coverage, universal masking is essential", the document added. Local media reported most of those infected in Nanjing were vaccinated, a situation that led to questions of the Sinovac vaccine efficacy.

"If the goal is to slow down the spread and reduce the fatality rate, [Chinese vaccines] can afford a certain degree of protection", assured the leading Shanghai infectious diseases expert, Zhang Wenhong. The country's top disciplinary watchdog pointed a finger at the airport officials in Nanjing for "poor supervision and unprofessional management", in failing to separate cleaning staff working on international flights from those on domestic flights.

No fewer than 132 countries globally have detected the presence of the Delta variant, making it the dominant global strain, according to the World Health Organization. Over the past few months COVID-19 infections increased by 80 percent in most regions of the world, stressed WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. In Africa, where only 1.5 percent of the population has been vaccinated, infections rose by 80 percent in a few weeks.

"Hard-won gains are in jeopardy of being lost and health systems in many countries are being overwhelmed", he noted. WHO technical lead on COVID-19, Maria van Kerkhove, affirmed the Delta variant to be about 50 percent more contagious than the ancestral strains of SARS-CoV-2 that emerged first in late 2019, in Wuhan, China. The good news is that though hospitalization rates have increased, not so higher rates of mortality from the Delta variant.

If there is any irony here, it is that the country where the coronavirus first emerged and managed to bring it under control -- while it went on to infect the rest of the world -- had  to battle a more virulent strain brought in from abroad. And that same country's vaccines have proven to be less effective than vaccines produced elsewhere in the world scientific-medical community. Yet by strict lockdowns and allied measures, China has time and again brought COVID under control, while throughout the world the virus rages and measures of control lack efficacy.