China stops reporting Covid tally data as world condemns; WHO chief says it is under-reporting deaths

Beijing, Jan 12: There have been several reports that China is not reporting the actual data on COVID-19 cases including the deaths.

 

With the criticism pouring in against Beijing, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the organization's data on the number of deaths from COVID-19 worldwide is lowered due to the under-reporting of cases by China.

 

 

Apart from this, Bloomberg reported that China hasn’t updated its daily Covid reports for three days, making more suspicious that it is masking the true impact of the world’s biggest outbreak.

 

The last time the country published its daily Covid situation update was published on Monday. The tally also included cases, the number of severely ill patients and deaths.

 

Health officials said last month that China would switch to monthly reports as part of its downgrade of virus management, without providing a specific date for the change. However, there hasn’t been an official notification about such developments.

 

Besides, Ghebreyesus said in a briefing, "Last week, almost 11,500 deaths were reported to the WHO: about 40 per cent from the Americas, 30 per cent from Europe and 30 per cent from the Western Pacific region. However, this number is almost certainly an underestimate, given the underreporting of COVID-related deaths in China."

 

 

"We continue to ask China for more rapid, regular, reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive, real-time viral sequencing," Tedros said at a media briefing in Geneva. This comment came after WHO held a high-level meeting with counterparts in China to discuss the surge in cases and hospitalisation.

 

China recently moved away from its strict ‘Zero Covid’ approach, which had sparked mass unrest after more than two years of tight controls on citizens’ personal lives.

 

China’s strict policy shielded its population from the kind of mass deaths seen in Western nations — a contrast repeatedly driven home by the Communist Party to illustrate the supposed superiority of its restrictions.

 

The Chinese government continues to insist that fewer than 40 people have died in China of Covid since December 7, when ‘Zero Covid’ restrictions, aimed at entirely eliminating the virus were suddenly dropped and infection numbers exploded. Exactly how Chinese authorities count Covid deaths has been a point of contention since the start of the pandemic.