Roving Periscope: China under-representing Covid deaths, says WHO
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: A fortnight ahead of China’s Lunar New Year (January 22), when the pandemic infections are likely to multiply exponentially in the Asian country, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that Beijing is “under-representing the true impact” of Covid-19, especially the exact number of deaths.
In 2020, the global health watchdog received much flak for allegedly siding with the Chinese narrative of the pandemic, even after Beijing stonewalled its attempts to investigate the source of the virus at Wuhan Institute of Virology, and, after several months, allowing a sanitized expert team for an officially conducted tour.
In a statement on Wednesday, Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said: “We believe that definition (of a Covid death) is too narrow,” the media reported.
China’s official figures “under-represent the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, ICU admissions, and particularly in terms of deaths,” he added.
Amid the ongoing fresh Covid tsunami, which commenced early in December 2022, China stopped publishing single-day tallies for Covid-19 cases and deaths.
Even after the videos of a massive surge of infected people, and piled-up bodies at hospitals and funeral homes went viral worldwide, Beijing has reported the number of deaths only in the single or early double digits. Despite several countries announcing restrictions on air travel of Chinese people, China has claimed these curbs are ‘politically motivated’ and ‘unscientific.’
In December 2022, to keep the official death toll low, China changed the criteria for what constitutes a Covid death. It declared that only those dying of respiratory diseases after a Covid infection would be counted as Covid deaths.
Learning from the 2020 flak of the WHO, Ryan stated that China had increased its ‘engagement with the WHO’ in recent weeks, and said he looked forward to receiving “more comprehensive data.”
But he also suggested individual health workers could report their own data and experiences.
“We do not discourage doctors and nurses from reporting these deaths and cases. We have an open approach to be able to record the actual impact of disease in society.”
Recently, the UK-based science data company Airfinity estimated that over two million Covid cases and 14,000 deaths a day could assault China in the weeks ahead.
Since December, Chinese hospitals and crematoria have been overwhelmed with patients and corpses since the country suddenly scrapped its three-year-old Zero-Covid strategy.
After the December outbreak, over a dozen nations, including India, introduced travel restrictions on travelers from China, which Beijing criticized as ‘unscientific’ and threatened to retaliate.
To the Chinese reports claiming no new Covid variants have been detected, despite the massive surge in cases, the WHO warned this could be because of a drastic reduction in testing.
