80% of China’s population has already contracted COVID-19 during the wave of infections after the dismantling of the national zero-tolerance policy against the coronavirus, estimated the chief epidemiologist of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the country, Wu Zunyou.
Taking into account the recent official population estimate of about 1,411.75 million people in the country at the end of 2022, the percentage offered by the epidemiologist would place the number of cases at about 1,129.4 million.
The figure exceeds the estimate offered a little over a week ago by a Peking University study, which spoke of some 900 million infections Until 11 January.
In a message published this Saturday on his Weibo social network account -the local equivalent of Twitter, censored in the country-, Wu relied on this data to predict that the risk of a a second wave of infections in the next two or three months is “very small”.
Regarding the risk derived from “the 5 billion journeys” expected for the first Lunar New Year without anti-covid restrictions, Wu acknowledged that the numbers of infections could increase in some areas, but ruled out that a “large-scale rebound” would occur.
In recent weeks, some voices have questioned the veracity of the figures offered by China, which for the moment acknowledges almost 73,000 deaths of COVID patients in hospitals between December 8 and January 19.
This balance of deaths contrasts with estimates such as those of the British health sector analysis company Airfinity, which recently assured that they could be reached about 36,000 deaths a day during the Lunar New Year holidays -January 21-27- in China.
after almost three years of harsh restrictions, confinements and practically total closure of borders that ended up crystallizing in protests in various parts of the country, China began to dismantle the ‘zero COVID’ at the beginning of December, and on January 8 it reduced the management of the disease from category A -level of maximum danger- to category B. , thus marking in practice the end of this strategy.
Source: Lasexta
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