Scientists predict China will see the largest COVID surge of the pandemic this winter, with hundreds of millions of people infected. But some experts say that it could have been even worse.
Travelers at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station in Shanghai, China on Dec. 12. China's public health officials say up to 800 million people could be infected with the coronavirus over the next few months.Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Travelers at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station in Shanghai, China on Dec. 12. China's public health officials say up to 800 million people could be infected with the coronavirus over the next few months.China is now facing what is likely the world's largest COVID surge of the pandemic. China's public health officials say that possibly 800 million people could be infected with the coronavirus over the next few months.
"Recently, the deputy director of China CDC, Xiaofeng Liang, who' s a good friend of mine, was announcing through the public media that the first COVID wave may, in fact, infect around 60% of the population," says, who's a global health researcher at Yale University and an expert on China's health-care system.
That means about 10% of the planet's population may become infected over the course of the next 90 days.agrees with this prediction."This surge is going to come very fast, unfortunately. That's the worst thing," says Cowling, who's at the University of Hong Kong."If it was slower, China would have time to prepare. But this is so fast. In Beijing, there's already a load of cases and [in] other major cities because it's spreading so fast.
To estimate a virus's transmissibility, scientists often use a parameter called the reproductive number, or R number. Basically, the R number tells you on average how many people one sick person infects. So for instance, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, in early 2020, the R number was about 2 or 3, Cowling says. At that time, each person spread the virus to 2 to 3 people on average. During the omicron surge here in the U.S.
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