The National Sanitary Commission of China announced on Saturday a total of 59,938 deaths from COVID between last December 8, when the authorities began to relax the restrictions they maintained against the pandemic, and January 12 of this year.
According to agency officials, the average age of the deceased registered in medical centers was 80.3 years old, according to the Global Times newspaper. Likewise, 90.1% of the deceased were over 65 years of age, and more than 90% suffered from underlying diseases, according to the Commission.
The agency clarified that it performs PCR tests to classify patient deaths as related to COVID, and that the causes of deaths from the virus were respiratory failure (5,503) or underlying diseases that worsen after developing COVID (54,435).
The agency also assured this Saturday that serious cases of COVID in the current outbreak spread throughout the country reached their peak on January 5, about three weeks after the authorities relaxed the ‘zero COVID’ policy that they had maintained until then. That day there were 128,000 serious cases, and that on the 12th it fell to 105,000 serious cases, according to commission officials.
The rapid spread of the virus in China in recent weeks has cast doubt on the reliability of official figures, which so far they had only reported a handful of deaths due to the disease despite the numerous scenes of high hospital pressure.
The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, assured last week that China is not giving full numbers of deaths from COVID in the current outbreak, which makes it impossible to know the true scope of the disease even on a global level.
China defends that it has shared its data “openly, punctually and transparently” since the start of the pandemic, and has asked the international community to avoid “politicizing the pandemic” as a result of the restrictions imposed on travelers from the Asian country, such as the requirement of some countries to present PCR tests before traveling.
According to a Peking University study, about 900 million people have already been infected by COVID in China after the country dismantled the ‘zero COVID’ policy and opted for more lax control of the pandemic. However, other Chinese experts believe that the peak incidence of covid cases in China will continue “until February or March”, as recently predicted by the former chief epidemiologist of the China Center for Disease Control Zeng Guang.
Source: Lasexta
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