China to face three Covid waves this winter, says chief epidemiologist

China will face three waves of coronavirus this winter, the country’s chief epidemiologist has predicted, after Beijing backed down over its “zero-Covid” policy in the face of large-scale protests.

Cities across the nation of 1.4 billion are bracing for the first waves of infections after tight restrictions in place for years were eased – with Xi Jinping’s regime scrapping travel-tracking apps and telling citizens to remain at home if they develop mild symptoms rather than shipping them off to crowded field hospitals.

The uneasy lifting of restrictions, long after every other major economy chose to do so, came after widespread protests, which morphed into calls for Mr Xi and his Communist Party to step down – in a level of dissent rarely witnessed, if ever, in mainland China during his rule.

The country’s top epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, was quoted by state media on Saturday as saying that, had the strict containment policies been lifted a year earlier, some 250,000 people in China would have died.

China is experiencing its first of three Covid-19 waves this winter, this time in cities, he suggested. The second spike is expected as residents return en masse to their native regions for the Lunar New Year holiday in January, with another from late February to mid-March as people return to work, Mr Wu said.

He also told the Beijing briefing that the proportion of seriously ill Covid patients had dropped to less than 0.2 per cent of reported cases, down from 3.3 per cent last year and nearly 16.5 per cent in 2020.

However, official case numbers have become unreliable as mass testing was dropped this month and Beijing stopped publishing data on asymptomatic cases on Wednesday as a result.

China’s official fatalities figures have also been called into question after news outlet Caixin published details of multiple deaths with coronavirus yet to be added to Beijing’s tally of 5,235 deaths since the pandemic began, with the last fatality reported by health authorities to have occurred on 23 November.

Meanwhile, modelling by the US-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) suggested on Friday that China’s easing of restrictions restrictions could result in an explosion of cases and more than a million deaths over the course of next year, with fatalities peaking at around 5,000 per day in April.

Roughly a third of China's population will have been infected by then, according to Christopher Murray, director of the institute, whose modelling drew upon data from a recent Omicron outbreak in Hong Kong, official vaccination figures and assumptions as to how various provinces will respond to rising infection rates.

Already the Omicron variant is spreading in major cities, and hearses were reportedly spotted lined up in their dozens outside a Covid-specific crematorium in Beijing this weekend, with funeral home workers among those absent from work after testing positive for the virus.

“We’ve fewer cars and workers now,” an employee at one funeral home told Reuters, adding that there was a mounting backlog of demand for cremation services. “We’ve many workers who tested positive.”

Two other employees at the funeral home, also speaking on condition of anonymity, claimed that the number of deaths was above average for this time of year, and was larger than prior to the easing of restrictions on 7 December.

With major cities reportedly eerily quiet this weekend, Shanghai’s education bureau has also mandated that schools hold classes online from Monday in a bid to counter the outbreak, while childcare centres have also been asked to pause their in-person classes.

Additional reporting by Reuters