Friday, 17 May, 2024
By: Yash Gupte
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), China has reported 10,088,555 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 31,378 deaths between 3 January 2020 and 20 December 2022. Image Source: IANS
Experts around the world are concerned with the under-reporting of COVID-19 cases in China. Latest videos and pictures from China show hospitals overburdened with COVID-19 patients.
China has once again become a cause of concern due to the deteriorating COVID-19 situation. An epidemiologist and health economist named Eric Feigl-Ding expressed alarm over China's underreporting of Covid-related deaths in a series of tweets on Monday. In the next three months, he predicted that there will probably be millions of deaths. According to his post, more than 60 percent of China's population could contract Corona in the next 90 days. Eric Feigl-Ding is an American public health scientist who is currently chief of COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute.
Experts around the world are concerned with the under-reporting of COVID-19 cases in China. Latest videos and pictures from China show hospitals overburdened with COVID-19 patients. Even the crematoriums in China are overburdened with the dead bodies of those who have lost their lives due to the virus. Workers at mortuaries also have to put in extra shifts to handle the surge in Covid deaths.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), China has reported 10,088,555 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 31,378 deaths between 3 January 2020 and 20 December 2022. As of 28 November 2022, a total of 3,465,113,661 vaccine doses have been administered in the country. The highest number of deaths in a single day (1,290) were reported on 18 April 2020. China reported 90,656 cases on 20 May 2022, the highest number of new cases recorded in a day.
The chart below shows the number of daily COVID-19 cases in China from 1 December 2022 to 19 December 2022.
Source: Media Reports
The highest number (62,439) of COVID-19 cases were reported on 2 December 2022. Interestingly, no cases were reported from 14 December to 16 December. The above chart shows that there has been a fall in the number of COVID cases in China in last 20 days but the viral videos and the ground reports shows a very different reality. Various reports have noted that China has been under-reporting the number of deaths due to COVID-19. Reports said that if a person died due to COVID-19 but already had a chronic ailment at the time, such as cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, Chinese hospitals would not identify the cause of death as COVID-19 but the chronic illness instead. However, majority of the restrictions are still in effect despite the minor changes.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a worker said that Dongjiao Crematory, operated by Beijing Municipality and which the National Health Commission has designated to handle Covid-positive cases, was receiving so many bodies that it was conducting cremations in the early morning and late at night. She calculated that the crematorium received almost 200 dead daily, up from 30 or 40 on an average day.
As fewer people test themselves at public facilities, the number of daily COVID cases has steadily decreased, and earlier this week, health authorities ceased publishing daily totals of asymptomatic cases for the first time since the pandemic began.
China had adopted a Zero-COVID policy under which it had imposed strict lockdowns in different parts of the country. The Chinese authorities also conducted mass-testing by setting up road-side COVID-19 testing booths, making it mandatory for the people to get tested before entering shopping malls and work places. China’s Guangzhou witnessed massive protests in the previous month. Thousands of protestors hit the street to protest against the lockdown and restrictions imposed by the authorities in wake of increasing cases of COVID-19. The security forces also led a heavy crackdown on the protesters. Lockdown was imposed in Guangzhou, one of the largest metropolitan cities in China in the last week of October 2022 amid the rising COVID-19 cases.
The protesters, mainly comprising migrant workers, complained about the shortage of food and other basic amenities during the three week-long strict lockdown. In Guangzhou’s Haizhu district, 1.8 million people were ordered to stay at home and undergo daily testing. But, in a surprising move, the Chinese authorities have taken a U-turn on the zero-COVID policy by lifting all the restrictions. According to reports, the surge in cases can be attributed to lockdowns in China due to which the people were not exposed to the virus and this resulted in less or no immunity among the people.
