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by Bernard Orr and Roxanne Liu
BEIJING, Dec 25 (Reuters) – China’s Zhejiang province, a major industrial region near Shanghai, is dealing with around one million new daily COVID-19 infections, a figure that is expected to double in the coming days, said the provincial government on Sunday.
Despite a record rise in cases in the country, China has not reported any deaths from COVID-19 in the past five days, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday.
The public and pandemic specialists, however, want access to more accurate data due to the increase in the number of infections since Beijing largely abandoned its “zero COVID” policy, which resulted in the confinement of hundreds of millions of Chinese and by a sharp economic slowdown.
China’s national figures are now incomplete, with the National Health Commission having stopped reporting asymptomatic infections, making it harder to track cases.
China’s Health Commission, which had released daily figures of COVID-19 cases for about three years, said it would no longer release such data from Sunday.
Zhejiang, however, is among the few regions to continue to provide data on recent spikes in infections, including asymptomatic cases.
“It is estimated that the peak of infection will arrive earlier in Zhejiang and enter a high-level period around New Year’s Day, during which the daily number of new infections may reach two million,” the official said. Zhejiang government in a statement.
China has also narrowed its definition of COVID-19-related deaths, counting only those due to pneumonia or respiratory failure caused by the coronavirus, drawing skepticism from global health experts.
The World Health Organization has not received any data from China on new hospitalizations due to COVID-19 since Beijing eased its restrictions.
According to the organization, this lack of data could be linked to the fact that authorities are struggling to identify cases in the most populous country in the world.
“THE MOST DANGEROUS WEEKS”
“China is entering the most dangerous weeks of the pandemic,” said the research institute Capital Economics in a study.
The approach of the Lunar New Year in January, during which large numbers of people travel to reunite with their families, is also expected to worsen the situation on the pandemic front.
“Authorities are now making almost no effort to slow the spread of infections, and with the onset of travel ahead of the Lunar New Year, all areas not currently in a major wave of COVID-19 soon will be,” observes so the institute.
The cities of Qingdao and Dongguan have each estimated the number of daily COVID-19 infections at tens of thousands in recent times.
According to state media, the country’s health system has been strained: sick officers have been asked to work and retired health care workers have been requisitioned. (Report Bernard Orr and Roxanne Liu, French version Jean-Michel Bélot)