Liang, center, Beijing, watches her 82-year-old grandmother being carried into a coffin to Gaobeidian Funeral Home in Hebei province, northern China on December 22, 2022. Liang’s grandmother was not vaccinated when She had symptoms of coronavirus, and spent the last days of her life wearing a respirator in the Beijing ICU.
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Liang, center, Beijing, watches her 82-year-old grandmother being carried into a coffin to Gaobeidian Funeral Home in Hebei province, northern China on December 22, 2022. Liang’s grandmother was not vaccinated when She had symptoms of coronavirus, and spent the last days of her life wearing a respirator in the Beijing ICU.
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China has stopped publishing daily COVID-19 data, adding to concerns that its leadership may be hiding negative information about the pandemic after easing restrictions.
China National Health Commission said in a statement that it will no longer publish daily data as of Sunday, and that “from now on, the Chinese CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) will release relevant COVID information for reference and research.” rescue.” The NHC did not say why the change was made and did not say how often CDC would release the data.
China is experiencing an increase in new infections since restrictions were eased. Particularly in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, Provincial Government said they experienced about 1 million new cases daily. Meanwhile, Bloomberg and Financial Times reported on a leaked estimate by top Chinese health officials that Up to 250 million people may have been infected in the first 20 days of December.
Despite the spike in infections, China has suspended most public testing kiosks, meaning there’s no accurate public measure of the scale of infections across the country.
Last week, Chinese health officials also defended the country’s high threshold for identifying a person who died from COVID-19. China currently excludes anyone infected with COVID who died but also had a pre-existing health condition and in the four days before the health commission decided to stop disclosing the data, China reported. There have been no deaths from COVID.
Last week, the World Health Organization warned that China could be “behind the curve” on reported data, offering to help gather information. “In China, what is being reported is a relatively low number of cases in the ICU, but the ICUs are anecdotally filled,” said Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program.
Airfinity, a British health data company, estimated last week that China’s real tally for COVID was one million infections and 5,000 deaths per day. On Friday, a health official in Qingdao, in China’s eastern Shandong province, said the city is seeing about 500,000 new COVID-19 cases a day. The report was shared by news outlets, but later appeared to have been edited to remove the figures. There have also been reports increased demand for crematoriums.
China earlier this month removed many of its COVID-19 restrictions following protests across the country criticizing its leadership. The protests were sparked by People died in apartment fire in Urumqi . city in Xinjiang province, killing at least 10 people. Some say the deaths could have been prevented if the restrictions were less stringent.
In a recent press conference, the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation forecast up to 1 million deaths by 2023 if China does not maintain social distancing policies.
Many fear that celebrations during next month’s Lunar New Year in China could become super-spreading events.
Emily Fang of NPR contributed to this report.
