China COVID Update: A media report quoted experts as saying that China has reported nearly 60,000 Covid-related deaths in the first five weeks of its current outbreak, the highest number the world has ever seen.
China’s sudden pivot from Covid zero in early December (2022) led to a surge in Omicron infections and 59,938 virus-related deaths in the country’s hospitals as of January 12, Bloomberg news agency cited data reported by the National Health Commission. .
While the official tally comes down from the few dozen deaths previously recorded – which has drawn widespread criticism both at home and abroad, including from the World Health Organization (WHO) – experts say it is still a massive underestimation. is likely to. The news agency reported that outbreaks and mortality rates were observed at the height of the Omicron waves in other countries that had initially adopted a Covid zero strategy.
“This number of COVID-19 deaths may be just the tip of the iceberg,” Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, was quoted as saying by the news agency. saying.
While this figure is roughly in line with Zhang’s estimate coming from the country’s hospitals, he said it is only a fraction of the total Covid deaths nationwide.
Using a report from the National School of Development at Peking University that found 64 percent of the population was infected by mid-January, they estimated that 900,000 people would have died in the previous five weeks, based on a conservative 0.1 percent case fatality rate. . The news agency reported that this means the number of official hospital deaths is less than 7 percent of the total death toll seen during the outbreak.
The official toll translates to 1.17 deaths per day for every million people in the country over the course of five weeks, according to a Bloomberg analysis. This is well below the average daily death rate seen in other countries that initially pursued Covid zero or managed to contain the virus after relaxing their pandemic rules.
When Omicron hit South Korea, the number of daily deaths increased sharply to about seven per million people. Australia and New Zealand saw mortality rates near or above four per million during their first winters with Omicron. Even Singapore, which had a planned and gradual move away from its zero-tolerance approach, had around two million deaths a day.
“These data show that there are very few deaths per case in China,” Lewis Blair, head of vaccines and epidemiology at London-based predictive health analytics firm Airfinity, was quoted as saying by the news agency. “This will be the lowest of any country/territory abandoning the zero Covid policy.”
It could be that many of the country’s deaths occurred in nursing care facilities or at home, explaining some of the undercount, Blair said, because China’s latest disclosure only counts hospital deaths. Reports of clogged cremation grounds across the country suggest that excessive mortality is at a high level.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently spoke to Ma Xiaowei, director of China’s National Health Commission, about the COVID-19 situation in the country. “WHO commends this meeting, as well as the release of public information on the overall situation,” the UN health agency said in a statement.
Chinese authorities have provided WHO with information on a range of topics, including outpatient clinics, hospitalizations, patients requiring emergency treatment and critical care, and hospital deaths related to COVID-19 infection.
The WHO is currently analyzing the information, which covers December 2022 to January 12, 2023, and allows for a “better understanding of the epidemiological situation and the impact of this wave in China”.
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