China announced this Sunday that it will stop publishing the daily report in which, since the beginning of 2020, it detailed the new cases of COVID-19 and deaths from the disease, after the rapid spread of the virus throughout the country has sown doubts about the reliability of the official figures.
“From now on, the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention will not release information about the pandemic on a daily basis,” the statement said. National Health Commission in a brief statement in which It does not detail the reasons why it has made this decision.
The agency added that it would “publish relevant information on the pandemic for reference and investigation”, but did not specify what type of data it will offer from now on or with what periodicity.
In recent weeks, the health authorities had already stopped disclosing the number of infections that, according to their standards, were considered asymptomatic, although these were only reported in the aforementioned daily report but they never added to the official balances of cases, to which only those infected who did present the required symptoms were added.
In addition, the end of the obligation to undergo routine PCR tests for most of the population resulted in a significantly lower detection of cases than the actual spread of the virus, since those who were asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms received the green light. of the Government to quarantine their homes.
The last official part, published on Saturday, gave an account of so only 4,128 new infections and no deathsplacing the sum of symptomatic infections since the start of the pandemic at almost 400,000 and that of deaths at 5,241.
However, the alleged minutes of a meeting of the National Health Commission that was echoed Bloomberg indicated that the real number of new daily infections could have reached 37 million and that, in the first days of this month, some 248 million people -18% of the national population- contracted COVID.
In the last days too Doubts have arisen about the fidelity of the death data offered by the health authorities, which barely count a handful of them due, according to an expert quoted by the state press, to the fact that deaths caused by underlying diseases in patients who were infected with the coronavirus are not counted as deaths from COVID.
The British health sector analysis company Airfinity estimated this week that China would currently be registering some 5,000 daily deaths from COVID, while its study places the number of new infections each day at around one million new cases, well below the figure quoted by Bloomberg but infinitely higher than those reflected in the official reports.
Also this week, the World Health Organization was “very concerned” about the evolution of COVID in China and requested “more information” in this regard, to which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded that Bejing has shared its data “in an open, timely and transparent manner” since the start of the pandemic.
(With information from EFE)
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