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China said its COVID-related death toll topped 12,600 in the week before the Lunar New Year holiday, while a top health official suggested more than 1.1 billion people had been infected since virus controls were abruptly dismantled late last year.
There were 12,658 COVID-linked deaths at hospitals between January 13 and 19, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement dated Saturday. A week earlier, the country reported 59,938 such deaths from December 8 to January 12.
People in a pedestrian shopping street at Qianmen, Beijing, on the first day of the Lunar New Year.Credit:AP
The data comes after China came under fire for dramatically narrowing its definition of a COVID-19 death and halting daily caseload reports. The World Health Organisation has urged Beijing to release more detailed information on the country’s COVID situation as the virus spreads rapidly throughout China after the sudden lifting of extensive COVID-zero restrictions.
China now appears to be trying to appease those concerns by reporting on deaths that fall outside the narrowed definition, which only counts fatalities from infected people with respiratory failure.
Even so, the numbers China is now revealing still present just a partial picture, given they count only deaths at hospitals, ignoring those that occur at home and in aged-care facilities. The true toll could be hundreds of thousands higher, given the extent of the outbreak and compared with mortality rates in other countries.
Separately, the China CDC’s chief epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, said in a Weibo post at the weekend that 80 per cent of the population had been infected in the current outbreak. China had a population of 1.41 billion at the end of 2022, suggesting more than 1.1 billion people have contracted the virus so far.
A toddler poses for a souvenir photo with a rabbit-shaped floral decoration during the Lunar New Year holiday in Beijing.Credit:AP
Wu didn’t elaborate on how the figure was calculated, given the country’s vast testing apparatus has been dismantled.
While travel during the Lunar New Year holiday period may lead to an uptick in cases in some regions, Wu said there is “very little chance” for large-scale infections or a second nationwide outbreak in the next two to three months.