Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The People’s Republic of China, which is currently battling an unprecedented Covid-19 catastrophe with millions of infections and hundreds of deaths daily, could witness around 25,000 deaths a day from the pandemic after January 22, 2023, the Lunar New Year, the media reported on Friday.
This scary scenario is casting a shadow over the start of the festivities in the absence of the strictures of the Zero Covid strategy suddenly lifted after December 7 because of preceding widespread protests against it. Abrupt lifting of the Covid rubs after three years exposed the inadequately immunized Chinese masses to the virus, leading to a Covid-19 tsunami within two weeks.
China, the world’s most populous country with 1.4 billion population, has unilaterally changed the definition of Covid deaths, blacked out information about the pandemic, and is no longer sharing the actual data with the rest of the world.
Expressing concern, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the health body needs more information to assess the latest surge in infections in China this month after Beijing dismantled its Zero Covid policies, including regular PCR testing on its vast population.
According to the media reports, quoting Airfinity Ltd, a London-based research firm focusing on predictive health analytics, mortalities from contagious respiratory illness will probably peak around January 23, the second day of the annual holiday. Daily infections will peak 10 days before, at around 3.7 million cases, it said.
These widespread outbreaks have been difficult to gauge without an accurate count as China is not sharing the data. It has forced observers to rely on outside estimates and anecdotal evidence.
“Using the trends in regional data our team of epidemiologists forecasts the first peak to be in regions where cases are currently rising and a second peak driven by later surges in other Chinese provinces,” Airfinity said in a statement late on Thursday.
At present, nearly 1.8 million Chinese are getting infected and 9,000 dying daily, as against 5,000 mortalities early this month. This is in sharp contrast to the government’s claims of just around a dozen Covid-19 deaths in total since the dismantling of Covid restrictions in early December. By the end of April 2023, the Asian country may see 1.7 million deaths from this tidal wave of infections, Airfinity said.
These estimates are based on data from China’s regional provinces, which had reported numbers far higher than official national figures, combined with trends seen in Hong Kong, Japan, and other countries when they lifted Covid curbs.
Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Thursday that Covid outbreaks have peaked in Beijing, Tianjin, and Chengdu. The situation in Shanghai, Chongqing, Anhui, Hubei, and Hunan remains serious, he added.
The disease might spread during Lunar New Year when the Chinese usually travel around the holidays. With the lifting of restrictions for the first time since the start of the pandemic in January 2020, a huge rebound in travel is anticipated during the holiday week in January, he said.
Excess mortality figures gauge the difference between the number of deaths caused during the current Covid wave and those expected had the pandemic not occurred. It has been used around the world to get a more comprehensive snapshot of Covid’s impact.
“The deaths caused by Covid are a worldwide concern,” Wu said. “By calculating excess mortality, we can figure out what could have potentially been underestimated.”
The CDC team did a similar excess mortality analysis for the initial outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where Covid first emerged. The National Health Commission added nearly 1,300 deaths from the city to its Covid death count in April 2020.
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, China has faced widespread criticism and unpopularity for its initial handling of the outbreak, including the transparency of reporting on its scale. The official tally for Covid infections has become all but meaningless as the once ubiquitous network of PCR testing booths shut. As of December 30, 2022, China officially claims a total of only 423,130 infections and 5,247 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic in December 2019.
This contrasts with scenes of overwhelmed hospitals and crematoria across the country which the world now knows but China claims it does not. Even some Chinese officials said a few regions are now grappling with a surge in severe Covid patients. The occupancy rate of intensive care unit (ICU) beds for the whole country hasn’t crossed the red line of 80%, but some parts of the nation are bracing for a peak in severe cases, said Jiao Yahui, an official overseeing hospitals at the National Health Commission.
The jump in cases has fueled concern across the globe about the emergence of new Covid variants that could be more contagious, lethal, or both. That has prompted numerous countries to adopt mandatory testing and entry restrictions for travelers from China, which also announced this week that it would reopen its borders on January 8.
This has worried the world no end: all outbound Chinese flights are reported to be full of infected people. In Italy, for example, half the passengers from a Chinese flight were found infected. In India also, some inbound passengers from China have been found infected.