Doctor allays fear over elderly deaths due to COVID-19

Very few elderly people actually die from the novel coronavirus, a doctor said on Tuesday, as the country reported five new COVID-19 deaths for Monday.

Wang Guiqiang, director of the Infectious Disease Department at Peking University First Hospital, made the comments at a press conference in response to recent discussions on social media about overload at funeral homes in China.

"The main cause of death is the underlying disease," he explained. "Only the deaths caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting COVID would be classified as COVID-19 casualties. Heart attacks or cardiovascular disease causing death of infected people will not get that classification."

Beijing reported five COVID-related deaths on Tuesday, following two on Monday, which were the first fatalities reported in weeks. In total, China has reported 5,242 COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, central Hubei Province, in late 2019, a very low toll by global standards.

Wang said that the recently hotly debated COVID-19 drugs like Pfizer's Paxlovid are not suitable for the general public.

They are only used for people at high risk of severe illness, especially older people with underlying conditions or those who have not been vaccinated.

"All the medicines should be used under the supervision of doctors," he stressed.

At the same press conference, Xu Wenbo, an official with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters that new strains of the coronavirus' Omicron variant such as BQ.1 and XBB have already been found in multiple provinces in China but he said there is no need to worry.

"New strains' immune escape ability has become stronger, more contagious," Xu said. "But the possibility of them becoming more lethal is low. The possibility of strains that are more contagious and more pathogenic is even lower."

The National Health Commission's press conference also responded to recent hot issues, such as how to address fever in babies.

It is not necessary for babies to be covered with extra clothes to reduce fever symptoms, and infants under two months, including newborns, cannot take oral antipyretic drugs and should be taken to hospital in time if they have fever, according to Wang Quan, director of the emergency internal medicine department at Beijing Children's Hospital.

On the other hand, "children should be prevented from catching a cold again, which will aggravate the illness", she added.

Meanwhile, Wang does not recommend parents identify their children's symptoms based solely on body temperature. "It usually depends, and parents should focus on improving children's comfort and relieving the symptoms."

Additionally, "those who live with 3-year-olds are advised to get vaccinated as soon as possible", Wang added. She also said that it is not clinically known whether 3-year-olds with the infection will have more severe symptoms than children of other ages.