The China Corona Virus outbreak is the largest the world has ever seen
The top health official in China has confirmed that the current outbreak in the country is by far the biggest the world has ever seen.
This week, minutes from a meeting of China’s National Health Commission showed that nearly 37 million people were infected with Covid-19 on a single day. This was according to a report from Bloomberg.
The health body thinks that as many as 248 million people got the virus in the first 20 days of December. That’s about 18% of China’s population of 1.4 billion.
The previous daily record was about 4 million. If these numbers are correct, they show that China’s current outbreak is by far the worst ever seen, while the official number screams of a cover-up.
The official number of infections reported on Tuesday was only 3049, which is a far cry from the estimated 37 million cases per day. This is several times more than the previous world record.
On January 19, 2022, the number of cases in the world reached a new high of 4 million, and Omicron took over as the most common variant.
The estimate is also a lot higher than a recent estimate from London-based health researcher Airfinity, which said earlier this week that about 1 million people in China were infected and 5,000 people were dying every day.
Chinese President Xi Jinping stopped his controversial “zero-Covid” policy all of a sudden in the face of strong anti-government protests. This led to a flood of cases, even though the official number of deaths is still suspiciously low.
On Wednesday, China said that since the beginning of December, only eight Covids had died.
But that number doesn’t include John Moffat Fugui, who was the ambassador of Solomon Islands and died in China during Beijing’s “Covid wave.”
Suspicions of hiding the truth
The numbers show that hospitals and crematoriums are getting more and more busy and are being pushed to their limits. As the health care system breaks down, horrifying videos have shown bodies “piling up” outside morgues and in hospital hallways.
AFP went to a crematorium in China on Thursday and said that 40 bodies were unloaded in two hours.
Several of the people who died told the newspaper that Covid was the cause of their deaths. One woman said that her elderly relative had tested negative for a cold but still died because they couldn’t get an ambulance to her in time.
A woman in her 20s said she thought her father had died of Covid, but he hadn’t been tested.
She cried, “He died too soon on the way to the hospital.” “At first, he had trouble with his lungs… He was just 69.
One hospital in Shanghai has told its staff to get ready for a “tragic battle” with COVID-19, because it thinks that by the end of next week, half of the city’s 25 million people will be infected.
“Deceased, deceased”: The dead are taken care of in makeshift wards
“Dead, dead!” yelled a staff member in full protective gear as she handed a nurse a death certificate. Their hospital in central China was full of Covid patients, and they were all shouting “dead, dead!”
When AFP went to No. 5 People’s Hospital in Chongqing on Friday, the main lobby had been turned into a makeshift Covid ward.
About a dozen beds filled with mostly older people on IV drips were blocked off with red and white tape in the huge atrium.
In a room nearby, about 40 mostly older and middle-aged people sat on sofas and laid on beds while getting IV drips. Some of them coughed.
All of them had Covid, the nurse said.
A count of deaths in politics
The number of official deaths seems to go up and down with the number of political protests in the country.
Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, told CNN that in April of this year, the definition of a “Covid death” was changed slightly in order to explain why Shanghai’s Covid lockdown is so strict.
From March to June, residents of Shanghai couldn’t even leave their homes to get groceries because of protests. In that time, 600,000 people got Covid, but only 588 of them died.
Once the lockdown was over, though, the official death count for the whole country stayed at zero for six months, even though the number of cases was going up.
Dr. Jin says that these differences show that the way China counts Covid deaths is “entirely subjective.”
“From the beginning, the death data have been wrong,” he told the publication.
As people struggle, the government takes away their medicines.
In the meantime, the government has been accused of taking away medical supplies while people have trouble buying the things they need.
Authorities told people with mild symptoms to stay home and treat themselves, which caused a rush on things like ibuprofen and rapid antigen tests. But, according to interviews with AFP and local media, officials have asked more than a dozen Chinese pharmaceutical companies to “secure supplies” of key drugs for the government.
Local reports say that at least 11 of the 42 companies that make test kits that are licensed by China’s medical regulators had some of their products seized by the government or got orders from the state.
China’s logistics and transportation sector as a whole has been “collapsed” by the widespread illness. Chinese videos that have gone viral show huge piles of boxes on the street and vehicles that are so full they can’t fit any more boxes. This shows that there is a serious backlog of deliveries.
It adds to an already worrying lack of pain and fever medicines, and because China is a global manufacturing hub, it has raised fears of a global shortage.
The spread of a new variant
There are also worries that the virus could quickly spread through China’s huge population and create a dangerous subtype.
Daniel Lucey, a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and professor at Dartmouth University’s Geisel School of Medicine, told Bloomberg there would “certainly be more Omicron subvariants developing in China in the coming days, weeks, and months.”
The World Health Organization also sounded the alarm. On Wednesday, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters that they needed more information right away.
On the other hand, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said that China had always shared Covid-19 information in a “transparent” way.
In a country where older people don’t get vaccinated as often as younger people, the outbreak is a big worry.
China has mostly used its own vaccines, which have been shown to be less effective at preventing serious illnesses and deaths from Covid than the mRNA shots used all over the world.