The guards of some hospitals in China, full of patients with coronavirus / afp
beijing
China, criticized for its lack of transparency on the Covid-19 epidemic, yesterday announced at least 60,000 virus-related deaths since the lifting of health restrictions in the country a month ago. But international organizations doubt the veracity of this data and fear that it is much larger, given the magnitude of the outbreak of the disease that occurs in the Asian giant.
After three years of enforcing some of the most draconian restrictions in the world, China abruptly lifted most of its coronavirus health provisions in early December, following protests against the severity of these measures in several cities across the country.
Since then the number of patients has increased considerably.
Overflowing hospitals
Hospitals have been overwhelmed by elderly patients and crematoriums have received large numbers of corpses.
Despite this, authorities have so far only reported a small number of deaths.
In December, Beijing revised its methodology for counting Covid deaths and now only people who died directly from coronavirus-related respiratory failure are included in the statistics.
The controversial change in methodology means that a large number of deaths are no longer recorded as due to covid. This clearly decreases the number of deaths that could have been triggered from the sum of pathology with Covid.
The World Health Organization (WHO) criticized this new Chinese definition of death from Covid as “too narrow”.
First non-exhaustive balance sheet
The health authorities released yesterday their first non-exhaustive assessment of the epidemic since the lifting of sanitary restrictions last month.
“A total of 59,938” deaths related to Covid-19 were recorded “between December 8, 2022 and January 12, 2023,” Jiao Yahui, head of the medical administration office of the National Health Commission.
Of these deaths, 5,503 were directly caused by COVID-19-related respiratory failure, it noted.
In addition, 54,435 deaths were due to underlying diseases associated with Covid, according to the same source.
This figure, which does not take into account deaths outside the hospital system, is probably an underestimate.
The WHO expressed doubts several times about the epidemiological data from Beijing.
“We continue to call on China for faster, more regular and more reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive sequencing of the virus in real time,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
The Chinese government has rejected the criticism and called on the WHO to take an “impartial” stance on covid.
On Wednesday, Chinese health authorities said it was “not necessary” at the moment to focus on the exact number of deaths related to the virus.
“The main task during the pandemic is to treat patients,” said epidemiologist Liang Wannian.
“At the moment, I do not think it is necessary to investigate the cause [de la muerte] of each individual case ”, insisted the one who is also head of the group of experts on covid in China for the National Health Commission.
no consensus
Liang Wannian also argued that there was no international consensus on how to classify a covid-related death.
If “a consensus cannot be reached, each country will rank according to its own situation,” Liang said.
China could determine mortality figures by examining excess mortality after the fact, suggested Wang Guiqiang, head of the department of infectious diseases at Peking University No. 1 Hospital.
At the time of that press conference on Wednesday, there had been just 37 Covid-related deaths in China since last month, out of a population of 1.4 billion.
Demand from other countries
The United States, South Korea and other countries again require that travelers from China present a negative test for the coronavirus, among other controls. Beijing responded to the measure by suspending the issuance of new visas to travelers from South Korea and Japan.
At the height of the pandemic, China kept the infection and death rate below that of the United States and other nations thanks to its strict “zero Covid” protocol, which sought to isolate each positive, although there were always doubts about these statistics. This policy closed the access to many cities, confined millions of people to their homes and provoked protests.
The average age of those who died since December 8 was 80.3 years and 90.1 percent were 65 years or older, according to the Health Commission. In addition, more than 90 percent of the dead suffered from cancer, heart or lung disease, or kidney problems, it added.
