Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Has the Covid-19 pandemic really subsided or morphed into an endemic? Or it’s just going unreported?
A new Covid variant called EG.5 or “Eris” has surfaced in the United Kingdom, and may have already killed two million in China, where it is dominant now, the reports said.
Reports have now emerged that around two million Chinese may have died, unreported, within two months after that country abruptly lifted “Zero Covid” restrictions in November 2022 and stopped making official daily deaths public soon thereafter, which, in case, were suspected from the very beginning in January 2020.
As mobs of angry people staged demonstrations across China, the Communist regime suddenly lifted the Zero Covid policy. Soon, millions of unprotected, unconcerned Chinese traveled across their villages, tourist destinations, and other places to celebrate the Chinese New Year which fell this year on January 22. Already, there were widespread apprehensions that the pandemic had become a serious endemic in China with medical, health, and funeral services completely collapsing everywhere.
China’s abrupt move to dismantle the strict Zero Covid-19 regime, which unleashed the virus onto its 1.4 billion residents, could have led to nearly two million excess deaths in the following two months, a new US study shows.
It is now public that China’s economy has slipped into deflation since then, despite many countries like India recovering very fast.
The US study carried out by the federally-funded Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle was taken from a sample of mortality data published by some universities in China and Internet searches, the media reported on Saturday.
The study found an estimated 1.87 million ‘excess deaths’ from all causes occurred among people over 30 years of age between December 2022 and January 2023 and were observed in all provinces in mainland China, except Tibet.
The three-year-long Zero Covid policy became highly unpopular in the second half of 2022 when the rest of the recovering world was opening up. Thousands of Chinese protested on the streets against the draconian policy, forcing the Communist government to lift the regime in November 2022.
The policy, which included compulsory mass testing and stringent and persistent quarantine lockdowns even if a single case of infection was discovered, led to a massive surge in hospitalizations and deaths that health experts say were largely unreported by the government.
The study, published on Thursday in JAMA Network Open, said the number of excess deaths far exceeded official Chinese government estimates in January 2023 that only 60,000 people with Covid-19 had died in hospitals since the Zero-Covid policy was abandoned a month earlier.
Researchers performed statistical analysis using information from published obituaries and data from searches on Baidu, a popular Chinese Internet search engine like Google.
“Our study of excess deaths related to the lifting of the Zero-Covid policy in China sets an empirically derived benchmark estimate. These findings are important for understanding how the sudden propagation of Covid-19 across a population may impact population mortality.”
Global health experts repeatedly called on China to reveal more data as reports of rising hospitalizations and deaths started to surface, especially as the threat of new variants became a concern.
China stopped reporting official daily death results at the end of 2022. The World Health Organization (WHO) says there have been only 121,628 Covid-19 deaths in China, out of a total global toll of almost 7 million.
In a rare move, one Chinese province briefly published data on its website in July 2023 showing cremations jumped 70 percent in the first quarter of this year but was later taken down.
In February, China’s top leaders declared a “decisive victory” over the pandemic.
But the virus is still making the rounds in China. On Thursday, Beijing health officials said Covid-19 is still the number one infectious disease in the capital, according to Chinese state media.
Officials cited a new Omicron variant, EG.5 or “Eris”, nicknamed after the Greek Goddess of strife and discord, as the current dominant strain across China.
“The National Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention said the proportion of the new variant EG.5 increased from 0.6 percent in April 2023 to 71.6 percent in August, becoming the dominant strain in most provinces in China,” the Chinese official mouthpiece Global Times reported.