Chinese health authorities this Saturday recognized 59,938 deaths related to the Covid-19 virus in just over a month since Beijing decided to end the iron pandemic policy overnight. According to the data offered in one performance, the deceased was on average 80.3 years old. Among the deaths registered from December 8th to January 12th, 5,503 deaths were due to respiratory failures caused by Covid infections; The remaining 54,435 were from people who were infected with Covid but had underlying conditions such as cancer or cardiovascular disease.
The publication of new figures comes under pressure from the World Health Organization (WHO), which has been criticizing Beijing for weeks for a lack of transparency and underrepresentation of the coup. “We continue to ask China for faster, regular and reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more complete real-time virus sequencing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged last week.
In a hearing this week, Chinese health officials stressed that it was “unnecessary” to bother identifying deaths from Covid while the country was suffering from a huge wave of infections. Liang Wannian, head of the China National Health Commission’s expert panel on Covid-19, said it was “kind of impossible” to pinpoint every single death at the moment, acknowledging that the most accurate way to estimate the number would be to count the current one Surplus of deaths to compare with previous years.
90.1% of the patients who died with Covid detection this Saturday were 65 years old or older, Jiao Yahui, head of the medical administration of the National Health Commission, told the press. Jiao has stressed that since winter is a season with a high incidence of respiratory, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases among the elderly, as other factors such as Covid-19 infection have recently been added, the number of deaths has increased older people is “relatively high”.
Jiao also asserted that the current wave has already passed the worst moment. “The number of visitors in fever clinics [destinadas a atender a pacientes con síntomas de covid] after peaking, it generally tends down,” he said, in both urban and rural areas. On January 5, Chinese hospitals had 128,000 patients with severe Covid, while on January 12, according to the data provided, there were 105,000. At the peak of the wave, on December 23 – two weeks after the reopening – 2.8 million patients visited the fever clinics; on January 12 they received 477,000.
Following the 180-degree turn in its anti-pandemic strategy implemented on December 7, the world’s most populous country had officially reported just 37 deaths from Covid as of Monday this week. That means little more than one casualty a day in a behemoth of 1,400 million people. Until the turnaround in health policy, China had only recognized 5,235 deaths since the pandemic began in 2020. The figures published so far have been contrasted with numerous testimonies and pictures of overcrowded hospitals and full morgues. Health consultancy Airfinity estimates that 1.7 million people could die in China by April 2023.
The country has also been criticized for lack of preparedness after three years of struggling to keep the virus to zero through technological applications, restrictions to the minimal outbreak and massive testing of the population. But Beijing had denounced that the criticism – which would highlight the lack of a reopening plan – was directed by Western media and politicians to criticize the country’s government.
At this time, with the Chinese New Year holiday celebrated on Jan. 22, there are fears that the wave of infections will spread from the big cities to rural areas where medical resources are scarcer. The Chinese executive expects some 2,000 million people to be displaced this week in what is widely known as the largest migratory movement on the planet.