Time.news – The Chinese Health Commission which has published daily data on Covid cases for the country in the last three years it will no longer release the data.
“Relevant information on Covid will be published by the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention for reference and research,” the Commission quoted by Reuters said. without however specifying the reasons for the change or how often Chinese health authorities will update information on Covid.
The rapid spread of the virus in the country has sown doubts about the reliability of the official data. “From now on, the Chinese Center for Disease Control will not release pandemic information on a daily basis,” the commission said in a brief statement.
In recent weeks, the health authorities had already stopped disclosing the number of infections which, according to their standards, were considered asymptomatic. Furthermore, the end of the requirement for routine PCR testing for the majority of the population has resulted in significantly lower case detections than the actual spread of the virus, as those who were asymptomatic received the green light and those who had mild symptoms.
The latest official communication, released on Friday, reported only 4,128 new infections and no deaths, placing the sum of symptomatic infections since the beginning of the pandemic at almost 400,000 and the number of deaths at 5,241.
However, alleged minutes of a National Health Commission meeting picked up by Bloomberg indicated that the true number of new infections per day could reach as high as 37 million and that, in the first days of this month, about 248 million people – 18% of the national population – contracted Covid.
In recent days, doubts have also arisen about the fidelity of the data on deaths offered by the health authorities, which count barely a handful due, according to an expert quoted by the state press, to the fact that deaths from pre-existing conditions in patients who have been infected with the coronavirus are not counted as Covid deaths.
British healthcare analyst firm Airfinity estimated this week that China would currently be on track about 5,000 daily deaths for Covid, while his study places the number of new infections each day at about a million new cases, well below the figure cited by Bloomberg but infinitely higher than those reported in official reports. Also this week, the World Health Organization said it was “very concerned” about the evolution of Covid in China and asked for “more information” about it. Appeal to which the Foreign Ministry replied that Beijing has shared its data “punctually and transparently” since the beginning of the pandemic.