  Recently, China announced that its "zero-covid" policy would end, which will
bring serious challenges to the country's health system. In here we provide
simple calculations that allows us to provide an estimate of what is expected
as an outcome in terms of fatalities, using the fact that it is a highly
contagious disease that will expose most of a highly vaccinated population to
the virus. We use recent findings regarding the amount of reduction in the risk
of severe outcome achieved by vaccination and arrive to an estimate of 1.1 m
deaths, 60% of these are males. In our model, 84% percent of deaths occur in
individuals with age 55 years or older. In a scenario in which this protection
is completely lost due to waning and the infection fatality rate of the
prevalent strain reaches similar levels to the observed in the beginning of the
epidemic, the death toll could reach 2.4 m, 93% in 55 years or older.
