China Returns to Its Strict Covid Limits to Fight a New Outbreak
...Beijing struggles with variants and questions about its vaccines.
China appeared to get the coronavirus under control nearly a year ago. But hundreds of millions of Chinese people remain unvaccinated. New variants of the coronavirus have appeared, and questions remain about whether China’s self-made vaccines can stop them.
...The authorities have blamed the Delta variant, which has caused widespread loss of life in India.
[Oh, so it has a new name; it's not the Indian variant anymore.]
...
The early infections appear to have jumped from person to person at a cluster of eateries. Each infected person has infected more other people than in any previous outbreak that China has confronted...
...
The spread of the virus has raised fresh questions about the effectiveness of China’s vaccines, particularly against variants. The Seychelles last month and now Mongolia in the past three weeks have both had large numbers of infections despite high vaccination rates. Both have used the Sinopharm vaccine from China, although the Seychelles also relied partly on AstraZeneca vaccines.
The Delta variant now circulating in Guangzhou has also shown the ability in other countries to infect some people who had already been vaccinated, a phenomenon known as vaccine escape. Research elsewhere has found that to be a particular problem for people who have received only a first injection of a two-jab vaccine and are then exposed to the Delta variant.
Researchers in Britain have found that receiving only the first of two shots of the Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines may be only 30 percent effective in preventing infection with the Delta variant...
After two doses, effectiveness appears to rise to 60 percent with the AstraZeneca vaccine and 88 percent with Pfizer-BioNTech.
[Man. Pfizer rocks.]
