Chinese authorities are rushing to boost the number of intensive care beds and health workers and increase medication supplies as Covid-19 surges through the country. Since the abrupt dismantling of the stringent zero-Covid regime, cases have skyrocketed in China. A full picture of the impact is difficult to gauge. Authorities have conceded it is “impossible” for the testing system to keep track, and the narrow parameters for attributing deaths to the virus mean the official count – fewer than 10 this week – is at odds with widespread anecdotal reports…
Tag: Medical research
Fears over China’s access to genetic data of UK citizens
Rising political and security tensions between Beijing and the west have prompted calls for a review of the transfer of genetic data to China from a biomedical database containing the DNA of half a million UK citizens. The UK Biobank said it had about 300 projects under which researchers in China were accessing “detailed genetic information” or other health data on volunteers. The anonymised data is shared under an open-access policy for use in studies into diseases from cancer to depression. There is no suggestion it has been misused or…
Half of Covid-hospitalised still symptomatic two years on, study finds
More than half of people hospitalised with Covid-19 still have at least one symptom two years after they were first infected, according to the longest follow-up study of its kind. While physical and mental health generally improve over time, the analysis suggests that coronavirus patients discharged from hospital still tend to experience poorer health and quality of life than the general population. The research was published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine. “Our findings indicate that for a certain proportion of hospitalised Covid-19 survivors, while they may have cleared the initial…
Car T-cell therapy shows early promise in treating gastric cancers
An experimental cancer therapy that infuses designer immune cells into patients has shown early promise in a clinical trial by shrinking tumours in the digestive system. Interim results from the first phase of the clinical trial found that nearly half, or 48.6%, of the 37 patients treated so far responded to the infusions with their tumours reducing in size after the therapy. While the findings come from an initial safety assessment of the approach, researchers running the trial in Beijing believe it demonstrates the potential for genetically-altered immune cells to…
As China looks on at a world opening up, can Xi Jinping survive zero-Covid?
Across much of the world people are taking international holidays, returning to the office, and going to festivals and political rallies. Faced with the seemingly unstoppable Omicron variant, they’ve decided to live as close to normality as they can in the presence of Covid-19, limiting its impact. But in Covid-zero China it’s a vastly different story. An estimated 340 million people in at least 46 cities are under some form of lockdown or restrictions in China, as cases appear in multiple provinces – often in so far tiny quantities. On…
China shuts down city of 17.5m people in bid to halt Covid outbreak
China’s government has locked down Shenzhen, a city of 17.5 million people, as it tries to contain its worst ever Covid-19 outbreak across multiple provinces, with case numbers tripling from Saturday to Sunday. All businesses in the finance and technology hub, which borders Hong Kong, were ordered to close or work from home unless they supplied food, utilities, or other necessities, according to a government notice on Sunday. It said all residential communities were now under “closed management”, meaning they would be locked down. Every resident would undergo three rounds…