China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention will study excess deaths and make these figures public, suspecting that official data on Covid-19 do not reflect the magnitude of the pandemic in the country.
The Center’s main epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, explained this Thursday that introducing a new variable will clarify whether the Chinese authorities have underestimated the scope of the health emergency.
Experts will calculate the difference between the total number of deaths and the number that would be expected in a non-pandemic context.
“Deaths caused by Covid-19 are a global concern,” Wu said at a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, confirming that authorities will apply a strategy similar to the one they have already adopted to estimate the impact of the initial outbreak. outbreak, in the city of wuhan.
The Health Ministry then added almost 1,300 deaths to its official tally. The government’s lack of transparency in data on the current wave of Covid-19, which spread rapidly with the abrupt end of restrictive measures in the first week of December, has already led several countries to reintroduce mandatory tests for travelers. that come from China.
While the Chinese government has stopped publishing the number of daily cases, officials in several cities have estimated that hundreds of thousands of people have been infected, while hospitals and crematoria are overwhelmed across the country.
The government has also narrowed the definition of death from Covid-19 so that only victims of respiratory failure directly caused by the coronavirus are taken into account.
Also Thursday, Xu Wenbo, head of the virus control institute of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said hospitals across the country will collect samples from patients and input sequential information into a new comprehensive database. , which will allow the authorities to monitor new tensions in real time.
More than 130 new omicron subvariants have been detected in China in the past three months, Xu said last week.
These include XXB and BQ.1, but BA.5.2 and BF.7 remain the main omicron strains detected in China, the Chinese official said, but none of these variants appear to carry specific new risks of more severe symptoms.
Source: TSF
