People visit Qianmen Street in Beijing, capital of China, June 3, 2020. Photo:Xinhua

China may face the risk of a COVID-19 epidemic for a second time as most people are still generally susceptible to the novel coronavirus and the pandemic is still severe globally, said a report led by Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

China's strategy of preventing the virus from spreading has been successful. The number of COVID-19 patients in the country would have been 67 times larger if no anti-epidemic measures had been adopted, such as quarantining suspected cases, tracking close contacts, or restricting the movement of people in certain areas, according to the paper published in The Lancet on June 6. 

But it also warned of a second wave of COVID-19 in China, urging the country to continue its strong repression strategy of preventing imported cases from causing local transmissions. 

Wang Chen, a renowned respiratory specialist, also said at a seminar on Tuesday that the virus will not disappear, noting that the epidemic situation is relatively good in summer, but it is necessary to have a sense of caution in winter and autumn. 

The virus seems to spread easily around January in Guangzhou and around March in Beijing, Wang said.

If the COVID-19 pandemic situation continues to deteriorate and its scale comes close to that of the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic, a 2 percent fatality rate would result in the deaths of about 50 million to 100 million people worldwide, the paper said.

The paper revealed that China's goal in combating COVID-19 is to maintain no local transmission or keep transmission at a low level until a safe and effective vaccine is developed and widely distributed to form a population immune barrier.

So far, four inactivated vaccines and one adenovirus vaccine have been approved for clinical trials in China, said a white paper titled "Fighting COVID-19: China in Action." 

China is currently developing COVID-19 vaccines in five categories - inactivated vaccines, recombinant protein vaccines, live attenuated influenza vaccines, adenovirus vaccines and nucleic acid-based vaccines, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Global Times