After Loosening COVID Restrictions, China Mandates Hospitals To Take Regular Virus Samples To Monitor Mutations

All of a sudden China seems content in trying to live with Covid and re-opening the country…it’s funny what happens when your citizens have had enough and decide they are no longer going to put up with it. The softer stance on the virus is coming just weeks after protests rocked major cities in China. 

As part of China’s “new” policy on how it is dealing with the virus, it is setting up “a nationwide network of hospitals to monitor mutations of the virus”, according to a new report from the South China Morning Post. 

As the SCMP notes: “Mass PCR testing was cancelled in early December and negative test results are no longer required to return to work or enter public places, including hospitals. There is no encouragement for people to get tested.”

Now, the country is bracing for new variants of the virus as a result of “waves” of the infection hitting the country in a short period of time, the report says. 

The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has now assigned one hospital in each city (with three cities in each province) responsible for collecting “samples from 15 patients in the outpatients and emergency room, 10 from patients with severe illnesses, and all fatalities.”

Xu Wenbo, director of the China CDC’s National Institute for Viral Disease Control said this week: “This will allow us to monitor in real time the dynamics of the transmission of Omicron in China and the proportion of its various sub-lineages and new strains with potentially altered biological characteristics, including their clinical manifestations, transmissibility and pathogenicity.”

“This will provide a scientific basis for the development of vaccines and the evaluation of diagnostic tools, including PCR and antigen tests,” he continued. More than 130 Omicron sub-lineages had been detected in China in the past three months, he said. He also predicts that new subvariants will continue to spread and mutations will continue. 

“As long as it circulates in the crowd, when it replicates, it will mutate,” he concluded.