China reports zero deaths from Covid-19 after change in death count

China assured this Wednesday that it did not register a single death from Covid-19 the day before, after changing the criteria to define deaths from the coronavirus, despite a wave of infections in the country.

Some hospitals are full, pharmacy shelves are empty and crematoria are overflowing after the government decided to end its policy of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing to contain the coronavirus.

China had imposed sanitary restrictions since 2020 in the name of the so-called “Zero Covid” policy, which made it possible to protect the people at highest risk and the least vaccinated. But the government ended most of these measures without warning in early December, against a backdrop of growing public exasperation and considerable impact on the economy.

The number of cases has skyrocketed since then, raising fears of high mortality among the elderly, especially vulnerable.

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The Chinese government announced on Tuesday that only those who died directly from respiratory failure caused by the coronavirus will be counted in the covid death statistics. According to the authorities, this “scientific” methodology provides a much more limited picture of the situation.

“After being infected with the omicron variant, the main cause of death is the underlying diseases. Only a small part die directly from respiratory failure caused by COVID,” said Wang Guiqiang, a Beijing city health official.

The change in methodology means that a large number of deaths will no longer be recorded as due to covid.

However, “WHO is very concerned about the development of the situation in China (…). In order to make a full risk assessment of the situation, WHO needs more detailed information on the severity of the disease, admissions hospitals and the needs of intensive care units”, declared this Wednesday the president of the World Health Organization (OMS), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesusin his weekly press conference.

Figures and politics

To the options omicron It doesn’t attack the lungs as much as other strains of Covid-19, says health expert Yanzhong Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank.

This new definition is an inversion of the prevailing international standard […] that counted as a death from covid anyone who died with covid,” Huang said. It’s hard to say that this is not politically motivated,” he says.

Several cities now allow residents to go to work as normal even if they have symptoms of Covid-19. A few weeks earlier, they would have been sent to a quarantine center in the name of the “Zero Covid” policy.

Meanwhile, from the northeast to the southwest of the country, crematorium workers told AFP they are struggling to deal with the uptick in the number of deaths.

Beijing admitted last week that the scale of the outbreak has become “impossible” to trace since the end of mandatory testing.

A leading Chinese health expert warned on Tuesday that the capital would face a spike in infections in the next two weeks, lasting until the end of January.

“We have to act quickly and prepare fever clinics and resources for serious and emergency treatment,” Wang Guangfa, a respiratory medicine expert at Peking University First Hospital, told the state-run Global Times daily.

The country registered 3,049 new cases of Covid-19 on Wednesday and no death.

According to official figures, only seven patients have died from covid since the restrictions were lifted. Finally, the authorities reduced this number to six on Wednesday, without giving any explanation.

The United States said on Tuesday that it was willing to supply China with Covid-19 vaccines.

“It is in the interest of the international community that we collectively help China keep (the outbreak) under control,” Ned Price, a spokesman for the State Department, told reporters.