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Up to 248 million people, or almost 18% of the populationyou probably contracted COVID in the early days 20 days of December, according to minutes from an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission (NHC) held on Wednesday, confirmed by those involved in the discussions. If accurate, the infection rate would dwarf the previous daily record by ones 4 million, established in January 2022.
Nearly 37 million people in China could contract COVID-19 in a single day this week, according to estimates from the government’s top health services, making the country by far the world’s largest outbreak from the sea.
Beijing’s rapid dismantling of zero COVID restrictions has led to the unrestricted spread of the highly contagious omicron variants in a population with low levels of natural immunity. More than half of residents of southwestern China’s Sichuan province and the capital Beijing have come forward, according to agency estimates.
It’s unclear how China’s health regulator arrived at this estimate, as the country earlier this month shut down its once-ubiquitous network of PCR test booths. Precise infection rates have been difficult to establish in other countries during the pandemic, as laboratory tests have been replaced by home tests with results not centrally collected.
The NHC did not respond to a faxed request for comment from Bloomberg News. The Commission’s new National Disease Control Office, which has overseen the COVID response, also did not return phone calls and faxes on Friday.
People in China now use rapid thickness tests to detect infections and are not required to report positive results. Meanwhile, the government has stopped publishing the daily number of asymptomatic cases.
Chen Qin, chief economist at data consultancy MetroDataTech, predicts China’s current wave will peak between mid-December and late January in most cities, an in-depth analysis of Internet keyword searches. . Their modeling suggests that the post-reopening surge is already responsible for tens of millions of daily infections, with the highest number of cases in the cities of Shenzhen, Shanghai and Chongqing.
unrecorded deaths
The minutes of the meeting do not report any discussion on the number of missing persons. They quoted Ma Xiaowei, the head of the NHC, reiterating the much narrower and much narrower new definition used to count COVID deaths. While acknowledging that deaths are inevitable due to the rapid spread of the virus, he stressed that only people who die of COVID-induced pneumonia should be included in mortality statistics.
Officials said Beijing, the first city hit, is starting to see a spike in severe and critical cases of COVID, even as the overall infection rate is declining. Meanwhile, the epidemic is spreading from urban centers to rural China, where medical resources are often lacking. The agency has traveled to all regions to prepare for the next wave of severe cases.
The 37 million daily cases estimated for December 20 represent a drastic deviation from the official tally of just 3,000 49 infections reported in China for that day. It is also several times higher than the previous world record for the pandemic. According to the data collected by Bloomberg.
The scale of the infection suggested by official estimates underscores the challenge China faces after abruptly abandoning the zero-COVID regime, which has largely kept the virus at bay for the past three years. Hospitals in major Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have been overwhelmed by the wave of remorse in patients, while crematoriums are struggling to cope with the tide of deaths.
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