7 Days In, Why Is Beijing Not Seeing a COVID Spike?
It seems like new anti-Covid measures are ramping up by the week, if not faster, in the capital, and the question on every Beijing resident's mind is whether the caseload will reach Shanghai-like levels.
No one can give a definitive answer to this question, but a cursory glance at Beijing’s daily numbers over time compared to the daily numbers of the early days of the Shanghai outbreak provides a stark – and somewhat optimistic – contrast.
In mid-March, Shanghai was seeing a daily caseload of about 30 new cases per day. Then, once it suddenly bumped up to 48 cases on Mar 29, steady growth ensued almost immediately, with the number of daily new cases increasing by between 50-100 per day until the city reached a critical mass of 899 cases on Apr 14.
New daily cases at the beginning of the Shanghai outbreak. Data from Johns Hopkins University CSSE, image via coronalevel.com
Beijing has already broken from this pattern. From mid-March to mid-April, the city saw between 1-13 new cases per day, until the current spike saw the city's caseload go from just 11 new cases on Apr 26 to 48 new cases on May 4.
But the difference is, the caseload has stayed hovering right around 48 new cases per day. Shanghai reached 48 new cases in one day and steady growth ensued immediately. But for one reason or another, cases in Beijing are behaving differently. The capital has managed to thwart daily case growth for a full seven days.
New daily cases in Beijing. Data from Johns Hopkins University CSSE, image via coronalevel.com
Unfortunately, we cannot conclude just yet that more growth won't come. But we can say with some level of confidence that the city's latest anti-Covid measures are a precautionary measure rather than necessarily being a sign of worse things to come.
If you want to track our daily cases for yourself, check out our article on how to do just that.
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Images: Unsplash, covidlevel.com
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