China Covid: Chinese hospitals and crematoriums are struggling with the influx of patients and bodies
Beijing:
China is experiencing a huge spike in Covid-19 after years of hardline containment restrictions were dismantled last month.
A growing number of countries are concerned about the lack of data and transparency around the China outbreak.
Here’s why it’s raising concern:
unreliable data
Beijing has admitted that the scale of the outbreak has become “impossible” to trace following the end of mandatory mass testing last month.
The National Health Commission has stopped publishing daily statistics of infections and deaths nationwide.
That responsibility has been transferred to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which will only release figures once a month after China relaxes its disease management protocols on January 8.
China has only reported 15 Covid deaths since it began lifting restrictions on December 7, shortly after which it lowered the criteria by which deaths from the virus are recorded.
This has fueled concerns that the wave of infections is not being accurately reflected in official statistics.
Authorities admitted last week that the scale of the data collected is “much smaller” than when the mandatory mass PCR tests were carried out.
CDC official Yin Wenwu said authorities are now collecting survey data from hospitals and local governments, as well as emergency call volumes and fever medication sales, which will “make up for the deficiencies in our reporting.” .
Chinese hospitals and crematoriums are struggling with the influx of patients and bodies, with rural areas particularly hard hit.
Several countries, including the United States, Australia and Canada, said last week they were placing testing restrictions on arrivals from China due to a lack of transparency in infection data.
fragmented estimates
Last month, some local and regional authorities began sharing estimated daily infection totals, as the scale of the outbreak remained unclear.
Health officials in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang believed that one million residents were infected every day last week. The cities of Quzhou and Zhoushan said at least 30 percent of the population had contracted the virus.
The eastern coastal city of Qingdao also estimated around 500,000 new cases a day and the southern manufacturing hub of Dongguan forecast as many as 300,000.
Authorities in the island province of Hainan estimated on Friday that the infection rate had exceeded 50 percent.
But senior health official Wu Zunyou said on Thursday that the peak had passed in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Tianjin, and the country’s most populous Guangdong province said the same on Sunday.
Shanghai’s top infectious disease expert, Zhang Wenhong, told state media that the megacity may have entered its peak period on December 22, with an estimated 10 million residents contracting covid.
Leaked notes from a meeting of health officials last month revealed that they believed 250 million people had been infected in China in the first 20 days of December.
Independent infection models paint a bleak picture. Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have estimated that nearly a million Chinese may die this winter as a result of the opening.
And health risk analysis firm Airfinity forecast 11,000 deaths and 1.8 million infections per day, bringing the total deaths to 1.7 million by the end of April.
New variants?
Many countries have cited concerns about possible new variants as a reason to screen for Covid in Chinese arrivals.
But there is still no evidence of new strains emerging from the current wave.
Senior CDC official Xu Wenbo said last month that China was developing a national genetic database of Covid samples derived from hospital surveillance that would help track mutations.
Chinese health experts have said in recent days that Omicron’s BA.5.2 and BF.7 sub-variants are more prevalent in Beijing, in response to public fears that the Delta variant may still be circulating.
They said that Omicron was also still the most dominant strain in Shanghai.
In many Western nations, these strains have been overtaken by the more transmissible XBB and BQ subvariants, which are not yet dominant in China.
Beijing sent 384 Omicron samples in the past month to the GISAID global online database, according to its website.
But the country’s total number of submissions to the database, at 1,308, is dwarfed by those from other nations, including the United States, Britain, Cambodia and Senegal.
The recent samples from China “all closely resemble the known globally circulating variants seen… between July and December,” GISAID said on Friday.
University of Hong Kong virologist Jin Dong-yan said on an independent podcast last month that people should not fear the risk of a new, deadlier variant in China.
“Many places around the world have experienced (large-scale infection), but no more deadly or pathogenic variant emerged afterward,” Jin said.
“I’m not saying that the emergence of a (more deadly) strain is completely impossible, but the chance is very small.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
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