White House monitoring outbreaks in China but sees nothing out of the ordinary

The White House says it is monitoring the surge in respiratory illness in China but there is no indication of a link between people seeking care in U.S. emergency departments and the outbreak in Beijing and surrounding regions.

Based on its provisional assessment, the U.S. and other countries are seeing seasonal trends in respiratory illnesses and nothing is out of the ordinary, a Biden administration official said Monday.

Hospitals in northern China have seen a surge of respiratory patients, particularly children, sparking here-we-go-again fears among some U.S. lawmakers after the communist government suppressed early signs of COVID-19 in late 2019.

A group of Senate Republicans urged President Biden last week to suspend travel with China until the U.S. learns more.

But the administration and medical experts are trying to allay those fears. They pointed to similar outbreaks of respiratory viruses in Europe, including known seasonal pathogens such as respiratory syncytial virus and a bacteria known as mycoplasma pneumoniae, which often affects children.

Scientists say parts of the Northern Hemisphere might be getting slammed because children, especially in China, didn’t acquire immunity to certain pathogens while society fully or partially locked down in the COVID-19 era.

The Biden administration says it is in contact with global health authorities and Chinese counterparts through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some GOP lawmakers say the U.S. cannot afford to accept China’s version of events, or the World Health Organization’s interpretation of what Beijing says.

“As you know, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a long history of lying about public health crises,” Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, J.D. Vance of Ohio, Rick Scott of Florida, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Mike Braun of Indiana said in a letter urging a halt in travel.

At the same time, health officials in parts of the U.S. say there is no indication that an uptick in local illness was from China.

Officials in Warren County, Ohio, said they’ve recorded an unusually high number of pneumonia cases — 145 — in children ages 3 to 14 years old this year. However, there have been no deaths and most cases recover at home with antibiotics.

“The Warren County Health District wants to reiterate, as stated in a previous media release, the increase in reported pneumonia cases is not suspected of being a new/novel respiratory virus but rather a large uptick in the number of typical pediatric pneumonia cases,” the department said last week. “There has been zero evidence of this outbreak being connected to other outbreaks, either statewide, nationally or internationally.”