Chinese investigation warns COVID outbreak “colossal” in US, if Reuters opens as in France

BEIJING (Reuters) – China could suffer more than 630,000 COVID-19 infections by raising travel tolerance per day by lowering zero tolerance policies, according to a study by mathematicians at Peking University.

In a report published by China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in China’s CDC Weekly, mathematicians said China could not remove travel restrictions without more effective vaccines or more effective treatment.

Using August data from the United States, Britain, Spain, France, and Israel, mathematicians evaluated the potential outcomes if China adopted the same tactics to control the pandemic in those countries.

New daily cases in China would reach at least 637,155 if the U.S. pandemic strategy were approved, the report says.

And daily cases would reach 275,793 if China took the same view of Britain and 454,198 imitated France, he said.

“The calculations revealed a real possibility of a colossal occurrence that would almost certainly cause an impossible load, in the medical system,” the report said.

“Our findings warn that, for the time being, we are not prepared to adopt open strategies based on the hypothesis of herd immunity driven by vaccines advocated by certain western countries.”

Mathematicians warned that their calculations were based on basic arithmetic calculations and that more sophisticated models were needed to study the evolution of the pandemic if travel restrictions were removed.

China has maintained a policy of zero tolerance with regard to COVID-19, saying that the importance of having local cases is outweighed by the disruptions caused by efforts to trace, isolate and treat the infected.

China reported 23 confirmed cases of coronavirus by Nov. 27, less than 25 a day earlier, its health authorities said Sunday.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday described a new variant of COVID-19 detected in South Africa with numerous mutations as “worrying”, prompting some countries to set travel restrictions.