No indication of new Covid variant from China, say health authorities

The existing data from China do not indicate the existence of a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, Greece’s National Public Health Organization (EODY) said in a statement on Monday, amid rising concerns in the international community regarding the strict restrictive measures in Shanghai. 

EODY said that after the first period of the pandemic (January-February 2020) China had almost zero cases by early March 2022. 

This was a consequence, EODY said, of the strategy of “zero dispersion” or zero-Covid concerning the application of strict restrictive measures in the event of a small number of SARS-CoV-2 cases being detected. 

The strategy was successful until recently, but not after February 2022, when a dispersion of the Omicron variant was observed, specifically of the Omicron 2 subgroup (BA.2), which presents high infectivity rates.