China expects to suffer another wave of coronavirus infections due to a “lack of immunity” in the nation, according to a senior government health official.
“We are facing [a] big challenge. It’s not better than the foreign countries, I think, at the moment,” said Dr. Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese government’s senior medical adviser, in a CNN interview published Sunday.
That assessment, delivered after weeks of Chinese officials offering up their response to the public health crisis as a model for the world, aligns with European expectations of new outbreaks this fall, and it raises the specter of a recurring pandemic, replete with new infections in the country where the contagion first emerged.
Those comments come just days after officials in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus pandemic began, reported their first cluster of new cases since early April. Wuhan officials reportedly are in the midst of an effort to test the city’s 11 million people, a widespread containment effort that contrasts with their attempt to cover up the initial outbreak.
“The local authorities, they didn’t like to tell the truth at that time,” Zhong said. “At the very beginning, they kept silent, and then I said probably we have [a larger] number of people being infected.”
Another cluster of outbreaks in northeast China has triggered a new lockdown affecting more than 100 million people, just as some U.S. states and European nations are trying to ease their own restrictions.
Amid criticism from the United States and others about the lack of Chinese transparency in the early stages of the crisis, Zhong kept the focus on local officials while maintaining that China has been transparent since the central government took an interest in the crisis. “All the cities, all the government departments, should report the true number of diseases — so, if you do not do that, you will be punished,” he said. “So, since … the 23rd of January, I think all the data … will be correct.”
