New Delhi: Amid global criticism of the country’s coronavirus data, China on Saturday (January 14, 2023) reported nearly 60,000 Covid-19 related deaths as it abandoned its zero-Covid policy last month. A health official said that COVID-19 fever and emergency hospitalizations had peaked and the number of hospitalized patients was continuing to decline.
Xiao Yahui, head of the Medical Administration Bureau under the National Health Commission (NHC), told a media briefing that between December 8 and January 12, the number of Covid-related deaths in Chinese hospitals totaled 59,938. Of these fatalities, 5,503 were due to respiratory failure caused by the coronavirus, while the rest resulted from a combination of Covid-19 and other diseases, she said.
Of the patients who died, 90.1% were 65 and older.
Xiao said the number of patients requiring emergency treatment is declining and the share of patients testing positive for COVID-19 at fever clinics has also been steadily falling.
He said the number of serious cases had also peaked, though they remained high, and patients were mostly elderly.
“The number of fever clinic visitors is usually in a declining trend after a peak in both cities and rural areas,” he said.
China, a country of 1.4 billion people, has seen a spike in coronavirus cases since early December, when it abruptly ended three years of a strict anti-virus regime of frequent testing, travel restrictions and mass lockdowns following widespread protests. was terminated.
China had previously reported just over 5,000 deaths since the pandemic began, one of the lowest death tolls in the world.
Officials had been reporting five or fewer deaths a day over the past month — figures inconsistent with long queues at funeral homes and body bags pouring out of overcrowded hospitals.
China, which last reported daily coronavirus death figures on Monday, has repeatedly defended the veracity of its data on the disease.
The World Health Organization (WHO), which said earlier this week that China was grossly under-reporting virus deaths and called for more information, on Saturday renewed its plea for more detailed data to Beijing. Welcomed the announcement.
The WHO said its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had spoken to Ma Xiaowei, director of China’s National Health Commission, about the latest outbreak, which the UN agency said was similar to that seen in other countries.
Concerns over data transparency were among the factors that prompted more than a dozen countries to demand pre-departure COVID-19 testing from Chinese travelers.
However, Beijing has objected to the sanctions.
Meanwhile, international health experts have predicted at least one million Covid-related deaths in China this year.
COVID-19 peak in China since last 2-3 months, next comes to rural areas
A top Chinese epidemiologist has said that the peak of the COVID-19 wave in China is expected to last for two to three months, and will soon spread to vast rural areas where medical resources are relatively scarce.
Infections are expected to rise in rural areas as millions travel to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year holiday, which officially begins on Jan. 21, known as the biggest annual migration of people before the pandemic. goes. But the worst of the outbreak was not yet over, warned Zeng Guang, former chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a report published Thursday in local media outlet Caixin.
Zeng is quoted as saying, “Our priority has been focusing on the big cities. It is time to focus on the rural areas.”
He said a large number of people in rural areas, where medical facilities are relatively poor, are being left behind, including the elderly, sick and disabled.
Chinese virologists said Friday that they discovered an infection with the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which WHO scientists described as the most transmissible subvariant ever reported after its rapid spread in the United States in December.
(with agency inputs)