The World Health Organization (WHO) is asking China for more data due to an outbreak of pneumonia in children.
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist, said the agency is “following China’s lead” as hospitals across the country continue to be overwhelmed.
Face masks and social distancing are again being recommended in the secretive country, in a chilling echo of the early days of Covid.
The country is experiencing a spike in pneumonia, dubbed ‘white lung syndrome’ because of the way lung damage shows up on scans, among children, which has been blamed on a resurgence of respiratory disease rather than an entirely new virus.
China had one of the most brutal and longest lockdowns of any country in the world, which the WHO says deprived children of vital immunity against seasonal diseases.
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist, said the agency was ‘following China’s lead’ after a surge in pneumonia cases in the country
The above photo shows children, parents and staff wearing face masks in a hospital ward in Beijing that is overrun with children suffering from pneumonia.
Dr. Van Kerkhove said at the conference today: ‘Yes, we are seeing an increase in respiratory infections around the world.
‘We are in the autumn and entering the winter months, so we expect an increase in the number of respiratory infections anyway.
‘We follow up on China. They are seeing an increase due to a number of different infections.
‘We are following this up with our clinical network and with doctors in China.
‘In terms of acute respiratory infections, we look at the burden on healthcare systems and at the healthcare capabilities of systems.’
The WHO has taken the unusual step of publicly calling on China to be transparent about the outbreak, which many say is due to its mishandling of Covid when the country was accused of shielding crucial information about the disease in its early stages .
It comes after Chinese Health Ministry spokesperson Mi Feng urged people in the country to reconsider wearing face masks and practicing social distancing.
At a press conference on Sunday, he said: “Efforts should be made to increase the opening of relevant clinics and treatment areas, expand service hours and increase the supply of medicines.
‘It is necessary to do a good job in preventing and controlling epidemics in important crowded places.
“(This includes) schools, childcare settings and nursing homes, and to reduce the flow of people and visits.”
Major children’s hospitals are recording 7,000 admissions a day in some parts of Beijing, reports show.
The largest hospital in Tianjin – a coastal province near Beijing – reportedly receives more than 13,000 sick children every day.
There have also been reports of spikes in childhood illnesses in Liaoning province and Shanghai, the country’s largest city.
Patients admitted to hospitals reportedly suffer from high fever and pneumonia, but without cough or pulmonary nodules – lumps in the lungs that are usually the result of a previous infection.
Scans also show opaque or clear areas in their lungs, which can be caused by bacterial infections, leading some doctors to call the disease “white lung syndrome.”
Chinese officials have insisted that no new pathogen is to blame, instead blaming a rise in common winter bugs as the country faces its first full winter without anti-Covid measures.
Chinese Health Ministry spokesperson Mi Feng urged people to resume social distancing and masking to prevent the disease
The WHO is under pressure to take tougher action against China after its response early in the Covid pandemic.
The agency is still reeling from suggestions that it was protecting Beijing by repeating the claim that Covid could not spread from person to person, despite there being no evidence to support the claim.
China is also under intense pressure to be more transparent about its handling of this outbreak following the emergence of Covid in 2019.
The country took weeks to warn the world about the then-mysterious pneumonia within its borders and also claimed that the disease could not spread from person to person, despite there being no evidence to support this claim.
The world was first alerted to the mysterious outbreak in China on November 21, when the disease surveillance system ProMED published an alert about reports of an ‘undiagnosed pneumonia’ in China.
The system – which also first sounded the alarm about the emergence of Covid in December 2019 – works to detect unusual health events linked to emerging infections.
The warning prompted the WHO to send an official request for a meeting with Chinese authorities, who agreed to a teleconference with the organization last Thursday.
The agency said the information provided indicated the clusters of cases were from known pathogens.
China also shared data showing that the country had made withdrawals Since May, an increasing number of children have been sick with mycoplasma pneumoniae – a bacterium that causes mild respiratory infections.
Childhood cases of RSV, adenovirus, influenza and COVID-19 have also increased dramatically since the fall, according to WHO data.
Concerns have been raised that people are becoming ill with a disease – similar to the early stages of the Covid outbreak.
The world was first alerted to the outbreak of ‘mystery pneumonia’ in China by a report published last week on ProMED – the same system that alerted the world to the emergence of Covid in Wuhan.
Chinese officials say no new disease has been discovered and that the cases are instead caused by a resurgence of other diseases such as influenza and respiratory synctial virus (RSV).
Repeated lockdowns and other measures – most severe in China – suppressed the spread of these diseases and weakened immunity against them, paving the way for a recovery once restrictions were lifted.
The US faced a similar wave of illnesses last winter during its own ‘exit wave’ from the pandemic, with many children’s wards overflowing, and so did Britain.
Experts have also suggested that the fact that this outbreak is mainly affecting children indicates that adults have already been infected and have immunity to the diseases causing this outbreak.