'White lung' is a more serious manifestation of pneumonia with white image area reaching 70 to 80 percent of patient's lungs. The term 'white lung' is now being overused on the internet, because some patients are simply mistakenly called having a 'white lung' though their symptoms are not that severe, experts noted. These hospitals normally collect 20 samples of throat swabs weekly and starting from mid-December, the sample size has been increased to 40.

Wuhan, for example, has three sentinel hospitals - Wuhan First Hospital, Wuhan Children Hospital and Jinyintan Hospital - whose data showed the dominant strain in the city is BA.5.2, Yang Xiaobing from Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention said. The new guidance on instructing viral strains said that sentinel hospitals are set up in three selected cities in each Chinese province and they are required to conduct genome sequencing analysis on 15 emergency cases, 10 severe cases and all deaths and upload the result to China's CDC within one week. To understand virulent epidemic strains in the very first time, the disease control and prevention departments will sample and sequence the strains that cause severe cases. Whole genome sequencing technology can sequence more than 30,000 basic groups of the coronavirus one by one, and perform bioinformatics analysis based on the results, so that different mutations can be classified into corresponding subtypes, Tong Yigang, a virologist and the head of College of Life Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, told Science and Technology Daily.

The prevalence of XBB, BQ.1 and other variants has not been found in the society, nor the prevalence of non-Omicron variants such as original strains and Delta strains, said Pan Yang from Beijing Municipal Disease Prevention and Control Center.Ĭhina has never stopped surveillance of domestic epidemic strains through whole genome sequencing, with no prevalence of Delta strain or the original strain being found. Some claimed that some COVID-19 patients in Beijing and North China's Hebei Province have shown signs of white lungs in their CT scan results and the phenomenon may indicate that these cases were not infected with the Omicron variant but the original variant that was detected in Wuhan, triggering public concerns or even panic.Ĭoronavirus strains circulating in Beijing are the Omicron variant strains BF.7 branch and BA.5.2 branch.

The country also has seven subbranches of Omicron variants circulating, Xu noted. Since the beginning of December, China's CDC has completed the whole genome sequencing of 1,142 cases through sampling survey, and found that the Omicron variant strains of the subbranches BA.5.2 and B.7 are dominant strains in the country, and the two together accounted for more than 80 percent of all cases. Real-time dynamic monitoring on COVID-19 shows no Delta variant was found to be prevalent in China, and no Delta variant was found to recombine with Omicron variant, Xu Wenbo, director of Institute of Viral Diseases, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China's CDC), said. Virologists and disease prevention and control departments denied reemergence of COVID-19 original variants and Delta in China, after concerns that the 'old' variants have caused an increase in COVID infections and some of the most severe cases showed white lungs in their CT scan results.

The city of Chengdu has built five air-inflated laboratories for COVID-19 nucleic acid testing, providing a daily maximum testing capacity of 250,000 tubes.(Photo: Xinhua) Medical workers work in an air-inflated testing lab in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Sept.

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