The nearly 60,000 COVID-related deaths China reported for the first five weeks of its current outbreak, the largest the world has ever seen, may underestimate the true toll by hundreds of thousands of fatalities, experts said
— experts say it’s still likely to be an underestimate given the enormous scale of the outbreak and the mortality rates seen at the height of omicron waves in other countries that initially pursued a Covid Zero strategy.
Using a report from the National School of Development at Peking University that found 64% of the population was infected by mid-January, he estimated 900,000 people would have died in the previous five weeks based on a conservative 0.1% case fatality rate. That means the official hospital death count is less than 7% of the total mortality seen during the outbreak.
“These figures would suggest that China is having a very mild wave, with very few deaths per case,” Louise Blair, head of vaccines and epidemiology at the London-based predictive health analytics firm Airfinity, said in an email. “It would be the lowest of any country/region abandoning a zero Covid policy.”
That led to a dearth of deaths reported throughout December and early January. Of the 60,000 Covid deaths disclosed over the weekend, a little more than 9% succumbed to respiratory failure, the NHC said. The rest died of underlying diseases following a Covid infection, the agency said.
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