SINGAPORE: China has seen a surge in acute respiratory illnesses affecting children since mid-October, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to request more information to determine if there were “clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia” among children in Beijing and Liaoning as reported in the media.
It’s no surprise people are concerned about the possibility of another pandemic, given news of a “mysterious illness” that might remind us of how COVID-19 began. After all, haven’t public health experts been warning that future pandemics are a matter of when not if?
This is known as the availability heuristic, where we take mental shortcuts based on familiar facts or immediate recent experiences and events.
China’s National Health Commission attributed the respiratory illness rise to endemic viral and bacterial respiratory infections and said on Saturday (Dec 2) that no new infectious diseases have been found so far.
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WHO had earlier said that the situation in China mirrored what had occurred in other countries a year or two ago. In these countries – typically at the start of winter – the relaxation of COVID-19 precautions had resulted in a surge of other respiratory pathogens such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Singapore had similarly seen a spike in such cases in August 2022 and February 2023. On Saturday, the Ministry of Health said there was no indication of increases in severe respiratory illnesses, including in children.
WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF THESE DEVELOPMENTS?
The current surge of respiratory illnesses in northern China does not portend a new pandemic. And there’s more positive news.
The global system of surveillance and response is clearly operating better than it did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn was already a vast improvement compared to the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak.
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This is not just in terms of technical capability – the cause of the respiratory infections in Beijing and Liaoning were rapidly ascertained – but also in terms of transparency and international cooperation.
China’s secrecy and delays in releasing information to WHO during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which further fuelled the divisive debate about a “Wuhan lab leak” or an animal origin for SARS-CoV-2, will unfortunately colour perceptions of the country’s transparency for some time to come.
For the current surge in respiratory illness, WHO requested additional information from China on Nov 22, via its International Health Regulations mechanism. The very next day, WHO and Chinese health authorities held a teleconference, where the requested data were provided.
The more such reporting and accounting is normalised, the better prepared we will be for future pandemics.
FAKE NEWS AND MISINFORMATION CAN RUN RIFE
But this episode also demonstrates the ongoing challenge of struggling against misinformation, particularly in the social media space.
On Nov 21, an abridged, edited and machine-translated excerpt from Taiwanese media FTV News was posted on the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) site. It highlighted an “outbreak of pneumonia in China”, with children’s hospitals in Beijing and Liaoning “overwhelmed with sick children”, schools “on the verge of suspension” and parents questioning “whether the authorities were covering up the epidemic”.
ProMED is the global disease surveillance system run by health experts that sounded the early warning on COVID-19. This ultimately triggered a WHO response that fuelled further global media reports and conjectures.