Chinese health authorities announced a total of 12,658 deaths related to covid-19 in hospitals, between January 13 and 19, which increase the official balance to 72,596 since last December 8, when the Government began to relax its “zero covid” policy.
Among these almost 13,000 deaths, the Asian country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) differentiates between 681 caused directly by covid and another 11,977 in cases in which other underlying ailments also had an influence.
The last update of the institution reports more than 470,000 hospitalized for covid throughout the countryof which some 52,000 were serious.
Since the end of December, China stopped publishing bulletins newspapers on the evolution of infections and deaths from covid to do so on a weekly basis, partly because the end of routine PCR tests for the population made it impossible to accurately know the spread of the virus.
In recent weeks, some voices have questioned the veracity of the death figures offered by China, which contrast with estimates such as those of the British health sector analysis company Airfinity, which recently assured that some 36,000 deaths a day during the Lunar New Year holidays, from January 21 to 27, in the country.
This same weekend, the chief epidemiologist of the CDC, Wu Zunyou, estimated on social networks that 80% of the Chinese population had already contracted the disease within the framework of the first great wave of infections after the dismantling of the ‘zero covid’, which would place the number of cases at about 1,129.4 million.
After almost three years of harsh restrictions, confinements and practically total closure of borders that ended up crystallizing in protests in various parts of the country, China began to dismantle the “zero covid” at the beginning of December, and on January 8, it reduced the management of the disease from category A —maximum danger level— to category B, thus effectively marking the end of this strategy.
