Under international health rules, China is supposed to answer the World Health Organization within 24 hours. The agency used that mechanism this week, asking Beijing for more detail on a rise in respiratory illness and on clusters of pneumonia reported in children in the north of the country.
The WHO said on Wednesday that groups including ProMED, the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, had flagged clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia in children. It was not clear, the agency said, whether those cases were tied to the broader increase Chinese authorities had already described or were separate events. It asked for epidemiologic and clinical information and for laboratory results. It also wanted figures on how known pathogens were circulating and how heavily health-care systems were burdened.
The ProMED alert traced back to a report by FTV News in Taiwan published on Tuesday.
A “routine” request
The WHO’s China office played down the move on Thursday. It called the inquiry “routine,” saying member states are regularly asked about increases in respiratory illness and pneumonia clusters in children. A statement was issued, it said, because the media had sent in a number of queries.
The WHO said it was in contact with clinicians and scientists in China through existing technical partnerships. China has systems to capture illness trends and report them to platforms such as the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, the agency added. Since mid-October, northern China has recorded more influenza-like illness than in the same stretch of the previous three years.
What Chinese officials said
China’s National Health Commission held a press conference on Nov. 13 to report the increase. Officials pointed to the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions and to known pathogens: influenza, RSV, the virus that causes COVID-19, and mycoplasma pneumoniae, a common bacterial infection that typically affects younger children. According to a transcript, undiagnosed pneumonia did not come up. One speaker said everyone felt respiratory illness had risen compared with three years earlier, and that global monitoring of mycoplasma pneumoniae had been low over that time. Outbreaks, the speaker added, are cyclical and arrive every three to seven years.
The commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the WHO notice. On Thursday it gave an interview to the state news agency Xinhua advising parents what to do and acknowledging that big hospitals had many patients and long waits. It did not mention the WHO.
Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at Hong Kong University, called it “just a relatively large seasonal surge, perhaps partly due to chance and partly because there’s a bit of ‘immunity debt’ from the lesser winter surges in the last three years.” China is heading into its first full winter since it lifted strict COVID-19 rules in December, and many other countries saw similar jumps after easing their own measures.
Crowded wards
Media in cities such as Xian have posted videos of hospitals full of parents and children waiting to be seen. Some social media users shared photos of children doing homework while on intravenous drips. Reports cited by the South China Morning Post described overcrowded fever clinics, emergency rooms and children’s wards.
Both China and the WHO have faced questions about how openly the earliest COVID-19 cases in Wuhan were reported in late 2019.
While it waits for answers, the WHO recommends that people in China get vaccinated, keep away from sick people, stay home when ill, get tested and seek medical care as needed, wear masks as appropriate, keep rooms well ventilated and wash their hands often. Parents worried about a child’s cough or fever should talk to their doctor.
Sources
- WHO seeks details from China on respiratory illness outbreaks | CBC News
- WHO asks China for details on surge in ‘undiagnosed pneumonia’ cases
