Covid: New variant warning as disease rampages through China - 'A threat for people everywhere'

A warning has been released after it was discovered that new Covid variants are surging across China.

The country rushed to install more hospital beds and screening clinics as a result of five deaths and growing case numbers.

China made the decision earlier in the month to abolish its “zero-Covid” approach which included mass lockdowns and testing.

The Chinese public grew increasingly frustrated at the measures, many of which the West have not had imposed on them in over a year.

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Protesters began taking to the streets, using blank sheets of paper to express their anger in a rare, widespread outpouring of public dissent.

However, as a result of the restrictions being lifted, the virus has started to run rampant through the country, whose population sits at 1.4billion.

There are concerns that there is a severe lack of natural immunity across the country due to the long periods of shielding.

An official from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention addressed the mutations but attempted to play down the severity and threat of Covid.

"New strains' immune escape ability becomes 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."

Alex Cook, vice-dean for research at the National University of Singapore's Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health said: "Every new epidemic wave in another country brings the risk of new variants, and this risk is higher the bigger the outbreak, and the current wave in China is shaping up to be big,

"However, inevitably China has to go through a large wave of COVID-19 if it is to reach an endemic state, in a future without lockdowns and the economic and political damage that results."

Elsewhere, Ned Price the U.S. State Department spokesperson said that the mutating virus was “a threat for people everywhere”.

Some health experts estimate 60 per cent of China’s population could be infected in the next few months.