Since China abandoned its restrictive policy of “zero COVID” For about two weeks now, the intensity and magnitude of the country’s first national outbreak has been largely a mystery. Now that mass testing is no longer being done, case counts are not as useful. The government has a limited definition of which deaths it should count as caused by covid. The censors promptly remove all anecdotal evidence, such as social media posts about hospital morgues being saturated with body bags.

Now, a picture is emerging that the virus is spreading like wildfire.

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In recent days, one province and three cities have reported figures of COVID-19 far exceeding official counts. At a news conference on Sunday, an official in Zhejiang province, population 65 million, estimated there were more than a million cases daily from covid in that region.

In the eastern city of Qingdao, with a population of 10 million, a health minister said Friday there were about half a million new cases a daya number that he expects to rise quite a bit in the coming days, according to local news sites.

In Dongguan, a city of 7 million in the central province of Guangdong, on Friday, a report from the city’s health commission estimated between 250 thousand and 300 thousand new cases daily.

Also in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, officials in Yulin, a city of about 3.6 million people, recorded 157,000 infections on Friday, December 23, with models indicating that more than a third of the city’s population was already infectedaccording to local media.

These figures stand in stark contrast to those from China’s National Health Commission, whose report on Friday claimed there were some 4,000 COVID cases across the country. They also stand in stark contrast to the picture the Communist Party has painted since its abrupt change of heart on COVID policy in early December. Experts from the health sector and the state media play down the importance of the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak, as they focus more on recovery stories than on cases of serious illness. The result is a one-sided presentation of an outbreak that some experts say could cause more than a million deaths in the coming months.

$!Police at the site of a second night of protests against China's strict anti-COVID policies near the Wulumuqi Road area of ​​Shanghai on November 27, 2022.

Police at the site of a second night of protests against China’s strict anti-COVID policies near the Wulumuqi Road area in Shanghai on November 27, 2022.

China has only acknowledged seven deaths from COVID-19 in the past two weeks and a few thousand new cases a day, a tally that is far short according to health experts.

On December 25, the China National Health Commission announced without explanation that it would no longer provide daily COVID data. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention will provide that information, the commission said, without specifying how often it would do so.

Karen Grepin, a public health expert at the University of Hong Kong, estimates that China could face tens of millions of new cases a day, based on estimates extrapolated from the outbreak that Hong Kong lived this year

Hospital and health sector workers face “unseen-before challenges,” according to the report by the health commission of Dongguan. Last week, the agency said that more than 2,500 of the city’s health workers went to work with confirmed infections of covid or with high fevers. in a hospital Dongguanalmost half of the 3,000 health workers had been infected, according to the report.

Qian Jun, deputy director of the health center of Dongguandescribed the overwhelmed health system as “a tragic situation.”

$!A street junction in Beijing, where a large screen shows a video of the People's Liberation Army, on December 20, 2022.

A street junction in Beijing, where a large screen shows a video of the People’s Liberation Army, on December 20, 2022.

In qingdaomakeshift medical sites handed out health packs containing 10 ibuprofen pills and two rapid antigen tests per person, according to local media reports.

Jin Dong Yanvirus expert at the University of Hong Kongstated that while many countries had problems with underreporting of major outbreaks for various reasons, such as asymptomatic cases or disincentives to report them, the official counts by the Chinese central government were so off as to appear false.

“That is unacceptable,” Jin said. “They have to rectify this at some point, and the sooner they do it the better.”

As the gap between official data and public perception has grown, so has online taunting. When the province of heilongjiang reported that there were five cases of covid Earlier this month, a person commented online that all these cases were known to him.

Even Hu Xijin, former editor of the newspaper Global Times of the Communist Party, criticized the official figures. In a WeChat blog posted on Saturday, he applauded the courageous reporting by Qingdao authorities, in contrast to official case counts that “are far removed from the public’s experiences.”

These measurements are causing an “erosion of credibility in official statistics,” Hu Xijin wrote.

The outbreak in China it is eroding not only the credibility of the government and its healthcare system, but also the ability to provide basic fever-reducing medicines. Millions of people now face the possibility of not being able to take them, since most of the effective drugs are out of stock in pharmacies. In Yulinauthorities ordered pharmacies to ration ibuprofen and other fever-reducing drugs, and not allow customers to buy more than a three-day supply.

Some officials have gone further. At least two Chinese pharmaceutical companies told The New York Times that the authorities had confiscated their stocks of ibuprofen and acetaminophen to prevent them from selling them to their regular customers.

$!A customer shops at a pharmacy, all of which are in short supply of cold and flu medicines, in Shanghai on December 14, 2022.

A customer shops at a pharmacy, all of which are in short supply of cold and flu medicines, in Shanghai on December 14, 2022.

These kinds of measures are reminiscent of what happened with the manufacturers of face mask almost three years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic. The measures taken at the time seemed more extensive, since they included not only Chinese-owned companies, but also multinationals such as 3M, the manufacturer of N95 maskswhich is headquartered in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but has long operated a mask factory in Shanghai.

Taken together, the shortage of medicines and the high count of cases in faraway cities in recent days paint the picture of a virus that is spreading much faster than experts estimated, Jin said.

“We expected explosive outbreaks,” he said, “but this one is much more devastating than the one in Hong Kong at the beginning of this year”.

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