H5N1

Airfinity’s COVID-19 forecast for China infections and deaths

Via Airfinity: Airfinity’s COVID-19 forecast for China infections and deaths. Excerpt:

Daily Infections: 1.8 million  

Daily deaths: 11,000  

Cumulative cases since 1st December: 20.4 million  

Cumulative deaths since 1st December: 110,000  

Data last updated on 30th December 2022  

Airfinity is forecasting COVID-19 infections to reach their first peak in China on the 13th January with 3.7 million cases a day.  

Deaths are estimated to peak 10 days later at approximately 25,000 a day, by that stage a total of 584,000 since the virus began surging across the country in December. We predict 1.7 million deaths across China by the end of April 2023.  

Airfinity’s model is based on data from China’s regional provinces, before changes to reporting infections were implemented, combined with case growth rates from other former COVID-zero countries when they lifted restrictions such as Hong Kong and Japan.  

Using the trends in regional data our team of epidemiologists has forecast the first peak to be in regions where cases are currently rising and a second peak driven by later surges in other Chinese provinces.  

Airfinity predicts cases in Beijing are likely to have peaked by now, with hospitalisations and deaths likely to peak in the next 1-2 weeks.  

Our model estimates a second peak will occur on the 3rd March 2023 where daily cases are likely to reach 4.2 million a day. It is expected that rural areas with be more impacted in this later wave.

China Covid: Experts estimate 9,000 deaths a day as US says it may sample wastewater from planes

Via The Guardian: China Covid: experts estimate 9,000 deaths a day as US says it may sample wastewater from planes. Excerpt:

The United States is considering sampling wastewater taken from international aircraft to track any emerging new Covid-19 variants as infections surge in China, as UK-based health experts estimate about 9,000 people a days are now dying of the disease in China.  

The proposed of testing wastewater by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would provide a better solution to tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the US than new travel restrictions announced this week, three infectious disease experts said.  

The US and a number of other countries have said travellers from China will require mandatory negative Covid tests.   

Their comments came as UK-based health data firm Airfinity said about 9,000 people in China were probably dying each day from Covid, nearly doubling its estimate from a week ago.

Covid infections started to sweep across China in November, picking up pace this month after Beijing dismantled its zero-Covid policies including regular PCR testing on its population and publication of data on asymptomatic cases.  

Cumulative deaths in China since 1 December likely reached 100,000, with infections totalling 18.6m, Airfinity said in a statement on Thursday. It used modelling based on data from Chinese provinces before the recent changes to reporting cases were implemented, it said.  

Airfinity expects China’s Covid infections to reach their first peak on 13 January with 3.7m cases a day.  

Their figures were in contrast to the several thousands of cases reported by Chinese health authorities a day, after a nationwide network of PCR test sites was largely dismantled and authorities pivoted from preventing infections to treating them.  

The European Union’s health agency said on Thursday it believed the EU-wide introduction of mandatory Covid screenings for travellers from China was currently “unjustified”, pointing to the “higher population immunity in the EU/EEA, as well as the prior emergence and subsequent replacement of variants currently circulating in China”.  

But in a series of tweets, the World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, renewed his appeal to China to be more forthcoming with detailed data on the pandemic situation in the country.  

“In the absence of comprehensive information from China, it is understandable that countries around the world are acting in ways that they believe may protect their populations,” Tedros wrote.

Shanghai hospital warns of 'tragic battle' as COVID spreads

Via Reuters: Shanghai hospital warns of 'tragic battle' as COVID spreads. Excerpt:

SHANGHAI/BEIJING, Dec 22 (Reuters) - A Shanghai hospital has told its staff to prepare for a "tragic battle" with COVID-19 as it expects half of the city's 25 million people will get infected by the end of next week, while the virus sweeps through China largely unchecked.  

After widespread protests against strict mitigation measures, China this month began dismantling its "zero-COVID" regime, which had taken a great financial and psychological toll on its 1.4 billion people.  

China's official death count since the pandemic began three years ago stands at 5,241 - a fraction of what most other countries faced - but now looks bound to rise sharply.  

China reported no new COVID deaths for a second consecutive day for Wednesday, even as funeral parlour workers say demand for their services has increased sharply over the past week.  

Authorities - who have narrowed the criteria for COVID deaths, prompting criticism from many disease experts - confirmed 389,306 cases with symptoms.

Some experts say official case figures have become an unreliable guide as less testing is being done following the easing of restrictions.  

Infections in China are likely to be more than a million a day with deaths at more than 5,000 a day, a "stark contrast" from official data, British-based health data firm Airfinity said this week.  

Airfinity said it examined data from China's regional provinces, noting that cases are rising quicker in capital Beijing and southern province Guangdong.

The Shanghai Deji Hospital, posting on its WeChat account late on Wednesday, estimated there were about 5.43 million positives in the city and that 12.5 million in China's main commercial hub will get infected by the end of the year.

China reports first COVID deaths in weeks as official count questioned

Via Reuters: China reports first COVID deaths in weeks as official count questioned. Click or tap through for the full report and a video. Excerpt and then a comment:

BEIJING, Dec 19 (Reuters) - China reported its first COVID-related deaths in weeks on Monday amid rising doubts over whether the official count was capturing the full toll of a disease that is ripping through cities after the government relaxed strict anti-virus controls.  

Monday's two deaths were the first to be reported by the National Health Commission (NHC) since Dec. 3, days before Beijing announced that it was lifting curbs which had largely kept the virus in check for three years but triggered widespread protests last month. 

Though on Saturday, Reuters journalists witnessed hearses lined up outside a designated COVID-19 crematorium in Beijing and workers in hazmat suits carrying the dead inside the facility. Reuters could not immediately establish if the deaths were due to COVID.  

A hashtag on the two reported COVID deaths quickly became the top trending topic on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform on Monday.  

"What is the point of incomplete statistics?" asked one user. "Isn't this cheating the public?," wrote another.   

The NHC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  

The low number of deaths since curbs were lifted on Dec. 7 is inconsistent with the experience of other countries after similar moves. Officially China has suffered just 5,237 COVID-related deaths during the pandemic, including the latest two fatalities, a tiny fraction of its 1.4 billion population.  

But health experts have said China may pay a price for taking such stringent measures to shield a population that now lacks natural immunity to COVID-19 and has low vaccination rates among the elderly.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects China will see 280,594 deaths from COVID-19 by April 1, 2023.

Hong Kong university predicts 1 million deaths if mainland China reopens without fourth Covid booster, antivirals and social-distancing curbs

Via South China Morning Post: Hong Kong university predicts 1 million deaths if mainland China reopens without fourth Covid booster, antivirals and social-distancing curbs. Excerpt:

Nearly 1 million people in mainland China could die from Covid-19 if the country fully reopens without ensuring a mass fourth-dose vaccination scheme, plenty of antiviral drugs and a raft of social-distancing measures, a University of Hong Kong study has predicted.  

Researchers, which included former university medical faculty dean Professor Gabriel Leung, wrote in the study that strategies to avoid an overwhelmed healthcare system and a high fatality rate were “urgently needed” after the country eased its zero-Covid policies last week.  

“We first consider the status quo without fourth-dose vaccination, antivirals and public health and social measures, and epidemics are simultaneously seeded in all provinces,” the authors of the study wrote.  

“In this case, reopening at the status quo would result in a cumulative mortality burden of 684 per million.”  

With a population of 1.41 billion as of 2020, there would be about 965,000 deaths, based on the Post’s calculations. The official Covid-19 death toll stands at 5,253.  

According to the findings, which are yet to be peer-reviewed, if the mainland kept its latest adjusted Covid-19 measures and reopened fully between December and next January, healthcare systems across all provinces would be unable to handle the surge in cases.  

“However, [a] safer exit from dynamic zero-Covid could be achieved by adopting a multipronged approach comprising vaccination, antiviral treatment, public health and social measures and sequential reopening,” it said in the study.  

Leung, who previously served as the undersecretary for food and health, used computer modelling to make predictions during Hong Kong’s fifth wave of the pandemic.  

In February, he estimated the number of fatalities could reach 7,000 in the city by mid-June if the healthcare system was overwhelmed. About 9,000 deaths were recorded by that time.

Launch of Scenario Hub projecting future COVID-19 health impact

Via ECDC: Launch of Scenario Hub projecting future COVID-19 health impact.

A new online modelling hub launched today, the European COVID-19 Scenario Hub, will present modelling projections on how the COVID-19 pandemic may evolve in terms of cases, hospitalisations and deaths. It will serve as a resource for Member States in their pandemic planning and inform decisions aimed at minimising the expected burden caused by COVID-19 under different scenarios.  

The hub is developed and run by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in co-operation with the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases (CMMID) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).  

“The Scenario Hub will help inform public health preparedness and anticipatory action as Europe transitions into new phases of the pandemic,” said Andrea Ammon, ECDC Director. “It will also play a key role in supporting ECDC's risk analysis, assessment of public health advice and strategic planning.”  

Sebastian Funk, Professor of Infectious Disease Dynamics at LSHTM, said: “Exploring plausible scenarios for the future of the COVID-19 pandemic can provide valuable insights for planning purposes. This Scenario Hub will bring together the expertise of different modelling teams to help policymakers come to informed decisions.”  

The Scenario Hub will be updated by collating long-term modelling scenarios for thirty EU/EEA Member States, the UK and Switzerland. Each potential scenario is composed of one or more plausible and policy-relevant variables (which could be, for example, biological parameters such as the rate of waning immunity, or assumed future changes in contact behaviours). Scenarios cover a period of nine to twelve months, including the coming winter period. Instead of just using single projections, the hub combines and compares different modelling projections from different modelling teams across Europe. The hub can thus contribute to increased confidence and robustness of drawn conclusions and insights.   

Scenario modelling combines the best-available epidemiological evidence with realistic assumptions on key uncertainties in order to create future trajectories of relevant indicators. From this, rational policies can be adopted at an early stage. Comparing results contributed by different modelling teams can highlight important parameters, assumptions and sources and the magnitude of their uncertainty, that would otherwise be difficult to capture.  

The Scenario Hub builds on the success of the European COVID-19 Forecasting Hub that was launched in early 2021 and continues to combine short-term forecasts on the number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths. The Scenario hub will complement the Forecasting hub with more long-term projections submitted by modelling teams in academic- and public health institutes across Europe and the USA. 

Visit the European Covid-19 Scenario Hub

Modeling transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron in China

Via Nature Medicine: Modeling transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron in China. The abstract:

Having adopted a dynamic zero-COVID strategy to respond to SARS-CoV-2 variants with higher transmissibility since August 2021, China is now considering whether and for how long this policy can remain in place. The debate has thus shifted towards the identification of mitigation strategies for minimizing disruption to the healthcare system in the case of a nationwide epidemic. 

To this aim, we developed an age-structured stochastic compartmental susceptible-latent-infectious-removed-susceptible (SLIRS) model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission calibrated on the initial growth phase for the 2022 Omicron outbreak in Shanghai, to project COVID-19 burden (i.e., number of cases, patients requiring hospitalization and intensive care, and deaths) under hypothetical mitigation scenarios. The model also considers age-specific vaccine coverage data, vaccine efficacy against different clinical endpoints, waning of immunity, different antiviral therapies, and non-pharmaceutical interventions. 

We find that the level of immunity induced by the March 2022 vaccination campaign would be insufficient to prevent an Omicron wave that would result in exceeding critical care capacity with a projected intensive care unit peak demand of 15.6-times the existing capacity and causing approximately 1.55 million deaths. 

However, we also estimate that protecting vulnerable individuals by ensuring accessibility to vaccines and antiviral therapies, and maintaining implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions could be sufficient to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system, suggesting that these factors should be points of emphasis in future mitigation policies.

Modelling shows BC likely undercounting death toll from COVID-19

Via CBC News: Modelling shows B.C. likely undercounting death toll from COVID-19. Excerpt:

British Columbia could be significantly undercounting its COVID-19 death toll, according to modelling data from a national project.  

The project, led by University of Toronto professor Dr. Tara Moriarty, looks at the risk of future severe outcomes from COVID-19 for every province and region in Canada.  

It has been tracking various metrics, including excess mortality resulting from COVID-19 and the effect of vaccines in reducing deaths and cases.  

One of the metrics tracked is the difference between expected deaths and reported deaths — the former an estimate by epidemiologists based on infection rates, vaccination rates and fatality rates.  Reported deaths reflect the official government count.  

According to that estimate, B.C. should have seen more than 980 deaths from Dec. 18 to Feb. 11 compared to just over 340 cases that were reported officially.  

"Outside of Quebec, which captures almost all of its COVID deaths, the rest of Canada in general historically under-reports, under-detects, about 50 per cent of its COVID deaths," Moriarty told CBC News.  

B.C. is currently experiencing a sustained spike in deaths, with the seven-day rolling average of COVID deaths up to 10.29 per day as of Friday.  

Moriarty says recent testing changes in B.C., which reserves COVID-19 tests for higher-risk populations, further complicate pandemic analysis.   

She says predicting the number of deaths beyond February is not possible given that modellers do not know how the virus is circulating in the community.  

"We really do have to resume or have surveillance testing in a way that's meaningful," she said.   

"We can't wait till we see [numbers of] hospitalizations and deaths, because Omicron moves so fast that we can't wait to see those lagging indicators to be able to respond."

Britain's pandemic modellers say future large waves of COVID possible

Via Reuters: Britain's pandemic modellers say future large waves of COVID possible.

LONDON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - There is a realistic possibility of large waves of COVID-19 infection in the future in Britain and such waves might even be considered likely, epidemiologists who model the COVID-19 pandemic to inform government advice have said.  

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has ditched legal restrictions in England, saying that, while the pandemic was not over, Britain needs to learn to live with COVID.  

The Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group (SPI-M-O) said the emergence of new viral variants was the biggest unknown factor in the medium-to-long term, along with waning population immunity and changes in mixing patterns.

"Large future waves of infection that need active management to prevent detrimental pressure on the health and care sector are, at least, a realistic possibility (high confidence) or likely (medium confidence)," SPI-M-O said in a consensus statement published on Friday.  

Britain has reported 157,730 deaths from COVID-19, the seventh highest total globally, and Johnson has faced heavy criticism for his handling of the pandemic, which has seen three national lockdowns. 

The Omicron variant fuelled a spike in infections to new highs at the end of last year, prompting Johnson to reintroduce some limited measures, but deaths did not rise at the same pace.  

He has now reopened the economy fully, citing the country's programme of booster shots, the availability of antivirals, and the lower severity of the Omicron variant, as breaking the link between infections and deaths.

England returned to Plan A last week, and the chair of SPI-M-O told Reuters that while each year should see the COVID situation improve, there may be times where the government has to go backwards and introduce measures. 

"The next few years will be highly uncertain, and future outbreaks and waves will likely be noisy as things settle down," the SPI-M-O statement said.  

"A steady, predictable pattern... may be many years away."

‘Crazy’ omicron surge could peak soon, but the virus is unpredictable as the pandemic enters its third year

Via The Washington Post: ‘Crazy’ omicron surge could peak soon, but the virus is unpredictable as the pandemic enters its third year. Excerpt:

The rapid surge of omicron infections in the United States may be relatively brief, measured in weeks rather than months, according to infectious-disease experts who have been astonished by the speed of the coronavirus variant’s spread — and who are hoping this wave ebbs just as quickly. 

The idea of a rapid peak and swift decline has a precedent in South Africa, the country that revealed the presence of omicron in late November. Cases there spiked quickly and then dropped with unexpected speed after only a modest rise in hospitalizations. An especially transmissible virus tends to run out of human fuel — the susceptible portion of the population — quickly.  

Some forecasts suggest coronavirus infections could peak by mid-January.  

“Omicron will likely be quick. It won’t be easy, but it will be quick. Come the early spring, a lot of people will have experienced covid,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an email Thursday.  

But this has always been an unpredictable virus, going back to when it first appeared two years ago, on Dec. 31, 2019. The virus had probably been spreading for a month or more, but that was the day infectious-disease experts around the world began hearing by email and text about an outbreak of a mysterious pathogen causing pneumonia-like respiratory infections in Wuhan, China.  

No one on that day could have known that this pathogen, initially called the “novel coronavirus” and later named SARS-CoV-2, would trigger the most brutal pandemic in a century. And no one today knows when it will be over.  

Forecasts of how the pandemic will play out have repeatedly been incorrect, to the point that some modelers have stopped trying to make caseload projections four weeks out, instead limiting their forecasts to one week ahead.  

Because beyond a week, who knows? How omicron is reshaping the pandemic Omicron is the fifth coronavirus variant of concern and is spreading rapidly around the world. 

Forecasts of the current winter wave, in which omicron has come riding in atop an existing delta wave, are somewhat more plausible. Columbia University researchers have a model that projects a peak in cases during the week beginning Jan. 9, with about 2.5 million confirmed infections in that seven-day period — and potentially as many as 5 million.  

Columbia epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman said the infection numbers reported in recent days are already at the high-end of projections, and the peak could come sooner. Omicron is setting new daily records for infections with the virus. The seven-day average of new, officially confirmed daily cases soared to more than 300,000 Wednesday. Then came the eye-popping Thursday numbers from state health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — 562,000 new cases, pushing the seven-day average to 343,000.  

The official number captures only a fraction of the true number of infections. People who use rapid tests at home may not report positive results. Many others never get tested when sick. And some people are infected but asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic.