CNN —
The World Health Organization has accused China of “underrepresenting” the seriousness of its Covid outbreak and has slammed its “narrow” definition of what constitutes a Covid death, as top global health officials urge Beijing to share more data on the explosive spread .
“We continue to ask China for faster, more regular and more reliable data on hospital admissions and deaths, as well as more comprehensive real-time virus sequencing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a media briefing in Geneva on Wednesday.
“WHO is concerned about the risk of life in China and has reiterated the importance of vaccination, including booster doses, to protect against hospitalization, serious illness and death,” he said.
Mike Ryan, WHO Executive Director for Health Emergencies, elaborated that the current figures released by China “underrepresent the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital and intensive care admissions and deaths”.
He acknowledged delays in reporting hospital data in many countries, but pointed to China’s “narrow” definition of a Covid death as part of the problem. The country lists only those Covid patients who succumbed to respiratory arrest as having died of Covid. In the two weeks leading up to Jan. 4, China reported fewer than 20 deaths from local Covid cases.
WHO officials, who have grappled with China’s tight controls on data access during the pandemic, have become louder in their calls for reliable information as a major outbreak ravages China’s urban centers after an abrupt relaxation of disease controls last month.
There, the outbreak has overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums, sparking shortages of essential medicines and raising fears of an even darker month as experts warn of spreading to less-resource-rich rural areas during the upcoming Lunar New Year.
The surge in cases in a country of 1.4 billion people has also raised global concerns about the possible emergence of new variants – and the level of surveillance and data sharing in China. A number of economies have introduced Covid testing requirements for travelers from China, citing a lack of data on tribes circulating there.
On Wednesday, the European Union “strongly encouraged” its member states to introduce a requirement for a negative Covid test for passengers traveling to the EU from China, according to a statement by the bloc’s Swedish presidency.
WHO’s Tedros said on Wednesday it was “understandable” that some countries were taking these steps, “with such heavy demand in China and no comprehensive data forthcoming.”
Chinese health officials presented updated genomic data to a WHO advisory panel during a closed meeting on Tuesday. The variants discovered there are known and circulating in other countries, with no new variant yet reported by the China CDC, the panel said in a statement on Wednesday.
But the group and WHO officials continued to emphasize the need for more genomic data. The latest situation adds to long-standing challenges for the UN body, which was criticized early in the pandemic for not pressing China hard enough for data amid fears Beijing was obfuscating critical information. Beijing has repeatedly defended its transparency.
“Much more data needs to be shared from China and additionally from around the world for us to be able to track this pandemic as we enter this fourth year,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for Covid, on Wednesday.
“We need more information about sequencing across the country and (and for) those sequences to be shared with publicly available databases like GISAID so that deeper analysis can be done,” she said. GISAID is a global initiative that provides access to the genome data of various influenza viruses.
Information on China’s outbreak would also be shared with WHO member states during a broader meeting on Thursday, WHO officials said.