China’s New COVID Crisis Could Spawn the Worst Variant Yet

The COVID wave crashing across China right now not only threatens the billion-and-a-half Chinese, it also poses a serious danger to the rest of the world.

Leaving aside the risk to already-fragile global supply chains, there’s a chance that the surge of infections in China will give the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen ample opportunity to mutate into some new and more-dangerous variant. If that happens, the progress the world has made against COVID since vaccines became widely available in late 2020 could slow, if not reverse.

“There’s the distinct possibility that things will get out of control in China,” John Swartzberg, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at the University of California-Berkeley’s School of Public Health, told The Daily Beast. “If that happens,” Swartzberg added, “there will be a remarkable amount of viral reproduction occurring in people and this will increase the possibility of problematic variants being produced.”

Experts disagree just how likely it is that the next major variant—“lineage” is the scientific term—might emerge in China. Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at The University of Hong Kong, said the next major lineage may come from countries where the virus has already swept through the population. Europe, for one, and the U.S.

But there are unique dynamics that boost the chances of a new SARS-CoV-2 lineage appearing in China. The Chinese population is huge—and might be way less protected against infection and thus viral mutation than, say, Americans or Europeans.

This disparity is partly the consequence of China’s earlier success against COVID. For more than two years, the Chinese government and health establishment managed to suppress the novel-coronavirus. This despite the pathogen likely originating at a meat market in Wuhan in east-central China in late 2019.

Thanks to China’s frequently severe limits on crowds and travel daily, the country went two years with practically no COVID. Yes, there were a few tens of thousands of cases across the vast country during the initial wave of infections in the spring of 2020. But after that, almost nothing. So few cases that the 150 or so daily new infections authorities logged in mid-January 2021 qualified as a surge.

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Then came Omicron. The new lineage, which first appeared in South Africa last fall, is by far the most transmissible. Some experts described the earlier form of Omicron, the BA.1 sublineage, as the most contagious respiratory virus they’d ever seen, owing in part to key mutations on the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect human cells.

The BA.2 sublineage that soon replaced BA.1 is even worse: potentially 80 percent more contagious than BA.1. There’s also a very rare “recombinant” form of Omicron called XE that combines the qualities of BA.1 and BA.2 and might be 10 percent more transmissible than even BA.2.

BA.1 and BA.2 shrugged off China’s strict social distancing. Even the most fleeting contact between family members, neighbors and coworkers was enough to ignite a viral firestorm in China starting in January.

Omicron struck the southern city of Hong Kong first, then neighboring Shenzen a few weeks later. After that, the Omicron wave spread to Shanghai, farther to the north, prompting the government to impose one of its strictest, and most controversial, lockdowns yet.

The virus kept spreading. By early April officials were logging an average of around 15,000 new cases a day. A spike in deaths followed. In Hong Kong alone, nearly 9,000 people have died since mid-February. To be clear, that’s a fraction of the infections and deaths that countries with fewer restrictions tallied during the worst of their own COVID surges. What’s so worrying in China is the trend—and the potential for cases, and deaths, to keep going up and up.

And not everyone trusts the official numbers. Chinese cities other than Hong Kong have yet to report COVID deaths from the current wave, leading some experts to ask whether the government in Beijing is deliberately delaying the data in order to mask the extent of the crisis. “I’m skeptical about the death rate reported in China,” Peter Collignon, an infectious disease expert at the Australian National University Medical School, told Bloomberg.

Paul Tambyah, president of the Asia Pacific Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infection in Singapore, told The Daily Beast there could be some under-reporting by health officials, but probably not enough to truly alter our understanding of the Chinese outbreak. “The active Chinese social-media scene, which…