The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday criticized China’s “very narrow” new definition of a death attributed to Covid, saying the statistics are out of step with the resumption of the epidemic in the country.
“We believe that the current figures released by China underestimate the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, intensive care admissions and especially in terms of deaths,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, the WHO official responsible for managing the health emergencies, during a press conference.
An outbreak of worrisome cases
China is currently facing its worst outbreak, following the abrupt abandonment in early December of its so-called “Zero Covid” policy.
Despite this unprecedented wave of contamination, the country reports very few deaths linked to Covid-19 after a controversial change in the methodology for counting cases. From now on, only people who died directly from respiratory failure linked to Covid-19 are counted in the statistics.
This change in methodology means that a large number of deaths will no longer be included as due to Covid. “We think this definition is too narrow” because it must be “related to respiratory failure,” Dr. Ryan insisted.
Need for “fast, regular and reliable” data
Last week, the WHO met with Chinese officials to discuss the explosion in the number of contamination cases and hospitalizations.
“We continue to ask China for faster, regular and reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more complete and real-time sequencing of the virus,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during this week’s press conference. Wednesday. .
“These data are useful to WHO and the world and we encourage all countries to share them. The data remains essential for WHO to carry out regular, timely and robust risk assessments of the current situation and adapt its advice and guidelines accordingly,” he said. .
Source: BFM TV
