BEIJING (AP) — China on Saturday reported nearly 60,000 deaths among people who had contracted COVID-19 since early December, providing hard figures for an unprecedented surge seen in overcrowded hospitals and overcrowded crematoria, though the government only little data has been released on the status of the pandemic for weeks.
Those figures may still underestimate the toll, though the government said it appears to have passed the “emergency peak” of its recent hike.
The toll included 5,503 deaths from respiratory arrest caused by COVID-19 and 54,435 deaths from other diseases combined with COVID-19 since Dec. 8, the National Health Commission said. It said these “COVID-related deaths” were occurring in hospitals, meaning anyone who died at home would not be included in the numbers.
The report would more than double China’s official death toll from COVID-19 to 10,775 since the disease was first detected in downtown Wuhan in late 2019. China has only counted deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official COVID-19 death toll. a narrow definition that excludes many deaths that would be attributed to COVID-19 in much of the world.
China has stopped reporting data on COVID-19 deaths and infections after abruptly lifting antivirus controls in early December despite a spike in infections that began in October and has filled hospitals with feverish, wheezing patients. Hospitals in Beijing across the country have been swamped with patients, and funeral homes and crematoria have struggled to deal with the dead.
The World Health Organization and other governments asked for information after reports from city and provincial governments suggested hundreds of millions of people in China may have contracted the virus.
Infection numbers now appear to be falling as the number of patients visiting fever clinics has declined, said National Health Commission official Jiao Yahui.
The daily number of people visiting these clinics peaked at 2.9 million on Dec. 23 and was down 83% to 477,000 on Thursday, Jiao said.
“These data show that the national emergency has passed,” Jiao said at a news conference.
Whether China has really passed a COVID-19 peak is difficult to assess, said Dr. Dale Bratzler, Chief COVID Officer at the University of Oklahoma and Director of Quality Control at the University Hospital.
“It’s hard to know,” said Bratzler. “China has quarantined people indoors, there are many people who are unvaccinated, people are at risk.”
dr Albert Ko, an infectious disease physician and professor of public health at the Yale School of Public Health, said the number of COVID-19 deaths China is reporting could be a “significant underestimate” given how it is defined.
“They use a very narrow case definition for (COVID) deaths,” Ko said. “You have to be in respiratory arrest … to be counted as a case you have to be in a place where you can say you meet all the requirements, and that’s in a hospital.”
Hospitals in China, Ko said, are mainly located in major cities where COVID outbreaks have been reported, rather than in remote rural areas.
“This is the Lunar New Year, people travel to the countryside where the population is at risk,” Ko said. “We are really concerned about what will happen in China if this outbreak spreads to the country.”
For nearly three years, China had kept its infection rate and deaths well below those of the United States and some other countries at the height of the pandemic with a “zero-COVID” strategy aimed at isolating every case. That blocked access to some cities, kept millions at home and sparked angry protests.
Those rules were suddenly relaxed in early December, after some of the largest demonstrations of public dissent against the ruling Communist Party in more than 30 years. This created new problems in a country that relies on domestically developed vaccines that are less reliable than others used globally, and where the elderly – who are more vulnerable to dying from the virus – are less likely to be vaccinated than the general Population.
The Health Commission said the median age of people who have died since December 8 is 80.3 years, and 90.1% are 65 years or older. More than 90% of those who died suffered from cancer, heart or lung disease or kidney problems.
“The number of elderly patients dying from disease is relatively large, which suggests that we should pay more attention to elderly patients and do our best to save their lives,” Jiao said.
The United States, South Korea, Japan and several other countries have imposed virus tests and other controls on people arriving from China. Beijing retaliated on Wednesday by suspending the issuance of new visas for travelers from South Korea and Japan.
This month, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said agency officials had met with Chinese officials to underscore the importance of sharing more details about COVID-19 issues, including hospitalization rates and genetic sequences.
___
Associated Press writer Ken Miller contributed to this report from Oklahoma City.