China breifs WHO members latest COVID-19 situation

Beijing, The Gulf Observer: China reported its COVID-19 situation as its health officials and experts attended an online meeting with the World Health Organization (WHO) and its member states on Thursday, according to the National Health Commission (NHC).

During the meeting, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention officials and experts from Southeast University reported on China’s latest COVID-19 prevention and control measures, its monitoring of mutated virus strains, vaccination efforts and the treatment of infections, NHC said in a statement.

This online meet up came after several information updates on the same subject throughout the previous month. Here’s a timeline of the latest meetings that China had attended with the organization.

On January 3, the CDC presented the genomic data of the virus strains that are currently circulating within the country when sharing at a virtual meeting with the Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution (TAG-VE).

On December 30, NHC officials talked to WHO via a video link about technologies that helped control the COVID-19 pandemic.

It also had a seminar with WHO that touched upon China’s COVID-19 treatment on December 9, two days after it announced the 10 optimized measures on COVID-19 control.

Meanwhile, China is also actively carrying out activities on virus strain surveillance.

A Shanghai-based research team just uploaded 369 new sequencing results of COVID-19 to GISAD which found the detection of XBB. 1.5 in China from imported cases. As of January 3, China has submitted 773 sequences to GISAID database, according to WHO.

As of now, the most predominant virus strain in China is BA.5.2 and BF.7, both of which have already been overtaken by more transmissible sub-variants in Western nations.