After the explosion of infections, China has announced nearly 60,000 covid-related deaths in one month

The National Sanitary Commission of China announced on Saturday a total of 59,938 covid-related deaths between December 8, when authorities began to ease the restrictions they had maintained against the pandemic, and January 12 this year.

According to agency officials, the median age of the deceased registered in medical centers was 80.3 years, Global Times newspaper reported today.

Similarly, according to the Commission, 90.1% of the deceased were over 65 years of age and more than 90% suffered from underlying diseases.

The agency clarified that it does PCR tests to classify patient deaths as covid-related, and that the causes of virus deaths have been respiratory failure (5,503) or underlying illnesses that worsen after developing covid (54,435).

The agency also assured this Saturday that severe covid cases in the current epidemic spreading across the country reached their peak on January 5, about three weeks after the authorities relaxed the “zero covid” policy they had maintained until then.

There were 128,000 serious cases that day, and on the 12th they dropped to 105,000 serious cases, according to commission officials.

The rapid spread of the virus in China in recent weeks has called into question the reliability of official data, which so far have reported only a handful of recent deaths from the disease despite numerous high-pressure hospital scenes.

Furthermore, since the beginning of the pandemic, it had recorded only 5,000 coronavirus deaths, a negligible number considering the density of the Chinese population and that the virus originated there and then mutated into one of the worst pandemics in living memory.

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, assured last week that China does not provide complete numbers of deaths from covid in the current epidemic, which prevents knowing the true extent of the disease even at global level.

China defends that it has been sharing its data “in an open, timely and transparent manner” since the start of the pandemic and has asked the international community to avoid “politicising the pandemic” following the restrictions placed on travelers from Asia. , such as requiring some countries to submit PCR tests before travelling.

Some 900 million people have already been infected with covid in China after the country scrapped its “zero covid” policy and opted for more lax control of the pandemic, according to a Peking University study.

However, other Chinese experts believe that the peak incidence of covid cases in China will continue “until February or March,” as former China Center for Disease Control chief epidemiologist Zeng Guang recently predicted.

Source: EFE