2023-08-29 17:13:19
by Cristina Brown
An American study published in Jama has processed the data on excess deaths in the country in the two months following the abandonment of the “zero Covid” policy
How many deaths have there been in China due to Covid? The data from the Asian country have always been rather mysterious and unreliable. The “zero Covid” policy, with very strong restrictions on the movement of people, has kept infections and deaths relatively low in a country inhabited by 1.4 billion people. But in December 2022 the “zero Covid” policy was abandoned: the Chinese were able to move overnight. But with a population that is poorly vaccinated (and those few vaccines made have proved ineffective) and practically immunologically naive, as the world was at the beginning of 2020, the infections exploded in a matter of days.
The analysis of excess mortality
Various Chinese or international scientific projections at the time estimated that deaths from Covid could have been between 600,000 and 2.1 million. Now an American work published by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in collaboration with two other independent scientists has found that in just two months following China’s suspension of the “zero Covid” policy, 1.87 million excess deaths.
In their study, published in Jama Network Open, the team of scientists used obituaries data from three Chinese universities along with other data obtained using the search engine Baidu regarding deaths in China of people over 30 from any cause in the same area where the three universities were located. Starting from the data obtained, using an algorithm, they estimated the deaths throughout the country for the two months following the abandonment of the “zero Covid” policy, reaching 1.87 million excess deaths.
The “zero Covid” policy
During the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, deaths from the disease were significantly lower in China than in other countries precisely due to the adoption of the “zero Covid” policy which imposed strict restrictions: people were ordered to wear quarantined and the authorities have implemented a program of regular testing, closed many workplaces and schools and instituted mandatory mask policies. The restrictions had a huge impact on the Chinese economy, and the government rolled out its zero-Covid policy in December 2022.
The data compared
Two months later, the Chinese government reported that some 60,000 people had died of the disease so far. The US working group ignored the official data by looking for another way to count Chinese deaths following the lifting of the zero-Covid policy. Instead, they analyzed excess deaths derived from sources that listed the number of people who died in a given time period, and compared that figure over the same time period in previous years. The difference, they suggest, is likely due to Covid-19 deaths being classified as something else. And the figure has risen from 60,000 official deaths to an estimated 1.87 million.
August 29, 2023 (change August 29, 2023 | 17:12)
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