Officially China has suffered just 5,237 Covid-related deaths during the pandemic, including the latest two fatalities, a tiny fraction of its 1.4 billion population and very low by global standards.
But health experts have said China may pay a price for taking such stringent measures to shield a population that now lacks natural immunity to Covid-19 and has low vaccination rates among the elderly.
Some fear China’s Covid death toll could rise above 1.5 million in coming months.
Dec. 16, 202203:11
Respected Chinese news outlet Caixin on Friday reported that two state media journalists had died after contracting Covid, and then on Saturday that a 23-year-old medical student had also died. It was not immediately clear which, if any, of these deaths were included in official death tolls. NBC News has not verified the reports.
“The (official) number is clearly an undercount of Covid deaths,” said Yanzhong Huang, a global health specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a U.S. think tank.
That “may reflect the lack of state ability to effectively track and monitor the disease situation on the ground after the collapse of the mass PCR testing regime, but it may also be driven by efforts to avoid mass panic over the surge of Covid deaths,” he said.
The NHC reported 1,995 symptomatic infections for Dec. 18, compared with 2,097 a day earlier.
But infection rates have also become an unreliable guide as far less mandatory PCR testing is being conducted following the recent easing. The NHC stopped reporting asymptomatic cases last week citing the testing drop.
China’s chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyou on Saturday said the country was in the throes of the first of three Covid waves expected this winter, which was more in line with what people said they are experiencing on the ground.
“I’d say sixty to seventy percent of my colleagues…are infected right now,” Liu, a 37-year-old university canteen worker in Beijing, told Reuters, requesting to be identified by his surname.
While top officials have been downplaying the threat posed by the new Omicron strain of the virus in recent weeks, authorities remain concerned about the elderly, who have been reluctant to get vaccinated.
Officially, China’s vaccination rate is above 90%, but the rate for adults who have received booster doses of the vaccine drops to 57.9%, and to 42.3% for people aged 80 and above, according to government data.
In the Shijingshan district of Beijing, medical workers have been going door-to-door offering to vaccinate elderly residents in their homes, China’s Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.
Overseas-developed vaccines are unavailable in mainland China to the general public, which has relied on inactivated shots by local manufacturers for its vaccine rollout.
While China’s medical community in general doesn’t doubt the safety of China’s vaccines, some say questions remain over their efficacy compared to foreign-made mRNA counterparts.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
