The world should 'calm down' about the possibility of new COVID-19 variants circulating in China, leading Chinese scientist George Gao said.
China ended more than three years of a stringent zero-COVID policy involving city-wide lockdowns, mass testing and extensive quarantine in December, which was followed by a wave of infections across its 1.4 billion population.already and China's CDC has said repeatedly in the past month that continuous monitoring showed no new strains of COVID-19 have been found.
Gao said China was continuing widespread viral genomic sequencing, and would identify any new variants if they emerged.The Chinese-funded study in the Lancet was conducted by researchers from the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CDC and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The authors said there were some limitations to the study, including China's decision to end large-scale mandatory testing. In the CDC's latest release on Wednesday, it said that from Sept. 26, 2022 to Feb. 6, 2023, 23,217 local cases of the novel coronavirus genome valid sequences were reported nationwide, all of which were mutant strains of Omicron, with the main epidemic strains BA.5.2.48, BF.7.14 and BA.5.2.49 .
A total of 13 cases of variants were found, including 1 case of XBB.1, 5 cases of BQ.1.1, 1 case of BQ.1.1.17, 4 cases of BQ.1.2 and 2 cases of BQ.1.8.Our Standards:
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