China said more than 12,600 people died of COVID-related causes in the week leading up to the Lunar New Year festivities, and a health official said around 80 percent of the population was infected with the virus in the current outbreak.
There were 12,658 COVID-related deaths in hospitals between January 13 and 19, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement dated Saturday. The country reported 59 thousand 938 deaths between December 8 and January 12.
The center’s chief epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, said separately in a Weibo post that 80 percent of the country’s residents were infected in the current round. While Lunar New Year travel can cause an increase in cases in some regionsWu said there is “very little chance” of large-scale infections or a second round of a countrywide outbreak in the next two to three months.
China had a population of 1.41 billion people at the end of 2022, suggesting that more than 1.1 billion people recently had the virus in the world’s largest COVID outbreak. Wu did not elaborate on how the infections were derived.
A sudden rollback of COVID Zero restrictions in December meant hundreds of millions of people were heading home for the Lunar New Year holidays for the first time since 2019.
President Xi Jinping highlighted the rural spread of COVID in a nationwide video address he made ahead of the holiday, saying he is especially concerned about efforts to combat the virus in the countryside. Health experts are concerned that the disease can wreak havoc on vulnerable people from villages with poor health care infrastructure, producing worse outcomes than the outbreaks that have already overwhelmed hospitals, overwhelmed crematoriums and paralyzed the country’s megacities.
There were 471,739 COVID-related patients in hospitals across the country on January 19, including 51 thousand 683 in critical condition. The data release on Saturday came after the World Health Organization (WHO) urged China to provide more information.
