China's Covid wave likely to kill one million people in coming months

The Covid situation in China is set to go from bad to worse in the coming days. According to reports, Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist, tweeted Monday warning that 'over 60 per cent of China's and 10 per cent of the Earth's population will likely be infected over the next 90 days' and that the deaths will 'likely (be) in the millions'. In a long Twitter thread, Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist warned of “thermonuclear bad” situation in China as infections grows rapidly across the country. Eric Fiegl-Ding is an American public health scientist who is currently chief of COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute.

The impact would not be limited to China and surge in Covid cases may trigger a total shutdown and severely impact global trade, the epidemiologist warned."Wuhan was our lesson 3 years ago. The global fallout of this 2022-2023 wave will not be small," he said. According to new projections from the US-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), China could face an explosion of Covid-19 cases and witness over a million deaths through 2023. To add to the worry, the virus seems to be spreading faster in China than its spread elsewhere. China currently has a few highly transmissible variants of Omicron spreading across the country, including one called BF.7. Scientists at China National Health Commission have estimated that the R number, which tells you on average how many people one sick person infects for the current variant, is 16, as per a report by npr. The present R number for China is higher than all the previous waves of the pandemic globally. The situation is expected to get worse with Christmas, New Year, and Lunar New Year right around the corner.