The China National Sanitary Commission announced this Saturday a total of 59,938 deaths related to covid-19 between last December 8, when the authorities began to relax the restrictions they maintained against the pandemic, and January 12 of this year.
According to agency officials, the average age of the deceased registered in medical centers was 80.3 years of age, the newspaper reported today. Global Times.
Likewise, 90.1% of the deceased were over 65 years of age, and more than 90% suffered from underlying diseases, according to the Commission.
The agency clarified that it performs PCR tests to classify patient deaths as related to covid-19, and that the causes of deaths from the virus were respiratory failure (5,503) or underlying diseases that worsen after developing covid (54,435).
The agency also assured this Saturday that serious cases of covid in the current outbreak spread throughout the country reached its peak on January 5, about three weeks after the authorities relaxed the policy of covid zero which they had up to then. That day there were 128,000 serious cases, and that on the 12th it fell to 105,000 serious cases, according to commission officials.
The fast spread of the virus in china In recent weeks, it has cast doubt on the reliability of official figures, which until now had only reported a handful of recent deaths from the disease despite numerous scenes of high hospital pressure.
The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesusassured last week that China is not giving complete numbers of deaths from covid in the current outbreak, which makes it impossible to know the true scope of the disease even globally.
China defends that it has shared its data “in an open, timely and transparent manner” since the start of the pandemic, and has asked the international community to avoid “politicizing the pandemic” as a result of the restrictions imposed on travelers from the Asian country. , such as the requirement of some countries to present PCR tests before traveling.
According to a study of the Peking Universityaround 900 million people have already been infected by covid-19 in China after the country dismantled the policy of covid zero and bet on more lax control of the pandemic.
However, other Chinese experts believe that the peak incidence of covid cases in China will continue “until February or March”, as recently predicted by the former chief epidemiologist of the China Center for Disease Control Zeng Guang.
