BEIJING, Dec 29 (Portal) – Around 9,000 people in China are likely to die from COVID-19 every day, Britain-based health data company Airfinity said on Thursday, nearly doubling its estimate from a week ago, as most infections have occurred globally populous nation.
COVID infections spread across China in November and accelerated this month after Beijing abandoned its zero-COVID policies, including regular PCR testing of its population and the release of data on asymptomatic cases.
Cumulative deaths in China since December 1 likely reached 100,000 with total infections 18.6 million, Airfinity said in a statement. It says it uses modeling based on data from Chinese provinces before recent changes in how cases were reported were implemented.
Airfinity expects China’s COVID infections to peak on Jan. 13 at 3.7 million cases per day.
This is in contrast to the tens of thousands of cases reported daily by health authorities after a nationwide network of PCR testing sites was largely dismantled as authorities moved from preventing infection to treating it.
Airfinity expects deaths to peak on January 23 at around 25,000 per day, with cumulative deaths since December having reached 584,000.
Authorities have reported 10 COVID-related deaths since December 7, when China made its abrupt political U-turn.
Health officials recently said they define a COVID death as a person dying of respiratory failure caused by COVID-19, excluding deaths from other diseases and conditions, even if the deceased tested positive for the virus.
As of December 28, China’s official COVID death toll since the pandemic began in 2020 was 5,246.
Airfinity says it expects 1.7 million deaths across China by the end of April.
According to its website, in 2020 it built “the world’s first dedicated COVID-19 health analysis and intelligence platform.”
China’s chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyou said Thursday that a team from the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention plans to reassess deaths.
The team will measure the difference between the number of deaths in the current wave of infections and the number of deaths expected if the epidemic had never emerged, Wu told reporters at a briefing.
By calculating so-called “excess mortality,” China can figure out what may have been potentially underestimated, Wu said.
Reporting by Ryan Woo and Joe Cash; Edited by Emelia Sithole-Matarise
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