The data provided by China on the death toll in the current wave of Covid-19 infections is “certainly short” of reality, epidemiologist and medical statistician Ben Cowling told Lusa.
“The data is certainly an underestimate of the real number,” said the epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong in an interview with the Lusa news agency.
According to official data released last Sunday, China has registered almost 60,000 deaths in hospitals linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, since the dismantling of the ‘zero cases’ policy in early December. The end of the restrictions resulted in an unprecedented wave, which experts believe has infected more than 900 million people, and the overcrowding of the country’s hospital system.
Ben Cowling explained that laboratory tests to detect the virus “are no longer frequently carried out in hospitals”, so “the majority of cases, hospitalizations and deaths from the disease [na China] They are not laboratory confirmed.
“This has been a problem in many parts of the world, but a unique observation regarding China is that the country has shown that it has the capacity at the laboratory level to test entire cities on a daily basis,” he noted.
As part of China’s ‘case zero’ Covid-19 policy, which has been in place for nearly three years, several Chinese cities have imposed a mandatory regime of nucleic acid testing for the entire population. Thus, hundreds of millions of people in the country were tested for the new coronavirus almost daily.
“The absence of laboratory tests now is certainly not due to a lack of capacity,” the epidemiologist stressed.
Ben Cowling considered the estimate that 900 million people have contracted Covid-19 in China in recent weeks “plausible”. This means that the majority of the country’s population, which has more than 1.4 billion inhabitants, has already acquired natural immunity to the coronavirus and that the peak of the current wave has passed.
“The results of the tests carried out by Taiwan on travelers from mainland China indicate a downward trend in the rate of positives,” the expert explained.
Cowling considered that the death toll in China could have been lower, but that Beijing opted for an “abrupt” relaxation of control measures and for an “immediate jump” from a containment phase to a recovery phase, abdicating strategies of mitigation to slow the infection curve.
“Reducing the height of the epidemic peak and spreading cases over a longer period of time can save many lives, while health resources are under severe pressure,” he stressed.
The epidemiologist considered that a “planned departure, with a clear schedule and communication”, would have allowed a “less impact” than the “sudden change of the ‘zero cases’ policy”.
The lifting of the restrictions followed large-scale protests in several cities across China. Some of the protesters chanted slogans against the Communist Party and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who took the ‘covid zero’ strategy as a political asset and proof of the superiority of China’s authoritarian rule model, after the country contained with successful initial outbreaks of the disease. .
“Hospitals could have been better prepared for the large increase in patients that occurred last month. Some older people who were not vaccinated might have been persuaded to get vaccinated if they had received clearer communication about the risk to their health once restrictions were lifted. Cowling told Lusa.
World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week that China was not providing full numbers of deaths from Covid-19 in the current outbreak, preventing it from realizing the true extent of the pandemic. disease worldwide.
China argues that it has shared its data “in an open, timely and transparent manner” since the start of the pandemic.
Source: TSF
