TonChina reported nearly 60,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the first five weeks of the current outbreak, the world’s largest ever toll, and likely underestimated the true toll of hundreds of thousands, experts said.
China’s sudden shift from Covid Zero in early December led to a surge in omicron infections and 59,938 virus-related deaths in hospitals across the country as of Jan. 12, the National Health Commission revealed this weekend.
read more: China’s stunning zero-COVID U-turn from suffocating control to callous inaction
While the figure tops the dozens of deaths previously recorded in official tallies – which has drawn widespread criticism at home and abroad, including from the World Health Organization – experts say that given the sheer scale of the outbreak and the initial pursuit of a Covid-zero strategy other countries, the death rate seen at the height of the omicron wave.
“The reported number of deaths from Covid-19 may be just the tip of the iceberg,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
While the figure was roughly in line with what Zhang estimated could have come from the country’s hospitals, he said it was a small fraction of the total number of COVID-19 deaths nationwide.
According to a report by Peking University’s National School of Development, 64% of the population was infected by mid-January, and he estimated that 900,000 people would have died in the past five weeks, based on a conservative case fatality rate of 0.1%. This means that official hospital deaths accounted for less than 7% of the total number of deaths during the outbreak.
The official death toll was 1.17 deaths per million people in the country every day for five weeks, according to a Bloomberg analysis. That’s well below the average daily death rate in other countries that initially pursued Covid-zero or managed to contain the virus after easing pandemic rules.
When the omicron struck South Korea, the daily death toll quickly climbed to nearly 7 per million people. During the first winter of omicron use, mortality rates in Australia and New Zealand approached or exceeded 4 parts per million per day. Even Singapore, which has planned and gradually changed its zero-tolerance approach, has seen its death toll peak at about 2 per million people per day.
“These data suggest that China is going through a very mild wave with very low numbers per death,” Louise Blair, head of vaccines and epidemiology at Airfinity, a London-based predictive health analytics company, said in an email. “This will be the lowest of any country that has dropped its zero-Covid policy.”
That could be because many of China’s deaths occur in nursing facilities or at home, she said, explaining some of the undercounting, since China’s latest figures only count hospital deaths. Reports of overwhelmed crematoria across the country suggest excess death rates are high.
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The group currently estimates the total number of coronavirus-related deaths in China at about 390,000, and could range from 77,000 to 945,000 based on deaths in other countries, she said.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus welcomed the new data from China, saying they would help to better understand the situation in China and the potential impact of the new crown epidemic. He also asked the country to continue sharing such information and provide a more detailed data breakdown by province.
new definition
China narrowed its definition of Covid mortality after scrapping a zero-tolerance approach, with health authorities requiring hospitals to limit Covid deaths to those who died of respiratory failure after contracting the virus.
This resulted in very few deaths being reported throughout December and early January. Of the 60,000 COVID-19 deaths disclosed over the weekend, slightly more than 9% were from respiratory failure, the NHC said. The remainder died from underlying conditions following infection with the new coronavirus, the agency said.
The death toll is expected to rise as the virus continues to rage across the country, officials said, because fatalities often lag infections by several weeks. Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the university’s chief strategy officer for population health, said the Lunar New Year holiday, which began Jan. 21, could increase its spread, which could increase its reach in Washington.
Mokdad said the group’s modeling work predicts between 1.2 million and 1.6 million deaths in China by the end of 2023, depending on the mitigation measures the country takes.
UCLA’s Zhang said that despite the scale of the current outbreak in China, China has the ability to accurately track the Covid death rate thanks to data from its public security, civil administration and hospital systems.
“More detailed information and transparent data on the coronavirus situation in China needs to be shared with the World Health Organization, other countries and the Chinese people,” he said.
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