Luis Ernesto Quintana Barney
(CNN) China’s top health authority says it has stopped publishing daily numbers of Covid-19 cases, as reports indicate the true death toll from the country’s ongoing epidemic is far worse than official figures issued by the authorities.
The National Health Commission (NHC) said on Sunday that the China CDC, a sub-department run by the NHC, would publish “relevant information about the outbreaks” instead. The decision to delegate case counting to a lower authority comes as China is hit by an unprecedented surge of the coronavirus after a drastic easing of restrictions.
The statement did not say how often China’s CDC will release its covid reports. Traditionally, China’s CDC only publishes monthly summaries of all infectious diseases regulated under Chinese law, from seasonal flu to hepatitis B to plague.
As crematoria fill up, China changes the way it counts covid-19 deaths
Since China slashed its covid restrictions earlier this month, there has been no clear data on how far the virus has spread nationwide.
China no longer officially reports the total number of infections, after authorities shut down its nationwide network of PCR testing booths and said they would stop collecting data on asymptomatic cases. People in China now use rapid antigen tests to detect infections and are not required to report positive results.
On December 21, 2022, medical staff wait to help a patient at a fever clinic treating Covid-19 patients in Beijing. Credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Health officials in China’s Zhejiang province, located just south of Shanghai, said on Sunday they were seeing more than a million new cases of Covid-19 a day. The province has a population of 64 million according to the latest census data published in 2021. According to CNN calculations, they would indicate about 1,563 new daily infections for every 100,000 inhabitants.
Zhejiang Health Commission Deputy Head Yu Xinle said the current surge in the province is expected to peak around New Year’s Day, with the daily number of infections reaching 2 million, which would equate to more than 3,000 new ones. daily cases per 100,000 people, and would last a week before subsiding.
The city of 9 million Qingdao in the northern province of Shandong also has about half a million new infections every day, the city’s health chief Bo Tao told reporters on Friday, adding that the peak is yet to come. According to CNN calculations, this represents 5,556 infections per 100,000 population.
In Dongguan, a city with a population of more than 10 million, health officials said on Friday they were recording between 250,000 and 350,000 new cases a day.
“The peak of Covid infection is approaching… the number of infections is increasing rapidly in Dongguan, our health care system and health care workers are facing unprecedented challenges and immense pressure,” said the health authority of Dongguan. Dongguan in a note.
sad estimates
For nearly three years, the Chinese government has used stringent lockdowns, centralized quarantines, mass testing and stringent contact tracing to slow the spread of the virus. That costly strategy was abandoned in early December after an explosion of protests across the country against harsh restrictions that have disrupted business and daily life.
However, experts have warned that the country is ill-prepared for such a drastic measure, failing to increase the vaccination rate of the elderly, increase intensive care capacity in hospitals and stockpile antiviral drugs.
A study in early December found that China’s sudden and unprepared exit from the zero covid policy could cause nearly 1 million deaths.
China prepares for a new wave of covid-19 2:10
Nearly 250 million people in China may have contracted covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate by the nation’s top health officials, according to Bloomberg News and the Financial Times.
If correct, the estimate, which CNN cannot independently confirm, would represent about 18% of China’s 1.4 billion people and would represent the largest outbreak of Covid-19 to date worldwide.
The cited figures were presented at an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission (NHC) on Wednesday, both media outlets said, citing sources familiar with the matter or involved in the discussions. The NHC’s summary of Wednesday’s meeting said it delved into the treatment of patients affected by the new outbreak.
The figures are in stark contrast to public figures from the NHC, which reported just 62,592 symptomatic cases in the first 20 days of December. CNN has reached out to the NHC for comment.
Facing growing skepticism that it is underestimating Covid deaths, the Chinese government recently defended the accuracy of its official tally by revealing it had updated its method of counting deaths from the virus.
According to the latest guidelines from the National Health Commission, only those whose deaths are caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting the virus are classified as Covid deaths, Wang Guiqiang, a leading disease physician, said at a news conference on Tuesday. infectious.
Those believed to have died from another underlying disease or condition, such as a heart attack, will not count as a virus death, even if they were ill with covid at the time, he said.
Officially, China had reported just eight Covid deaths this month as of Dec. 22, a surprisingly low number given the rapid spread of the virus and relatively low rates of booster shots among vulnerable older adults.
The official tally was met with incredulity and ridicule online, where posts mourning loved ones dying of covid abound. Caixin, a Chinese financial magazine known for its investigative articles, reported the deaths of two veteran state media reporters infected with covid, on days when the official number was zero.
CNN’s Nectar Gan, Selina Wang, and Cheng Cheng contributed to this report.
The CNN thread
™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
