Unreliable data

Beijing has recognized this: since the abandonment of large-scale population screenings by PCR tests last month, quantifying contagions on its territory has become "impossible".

The National Health Commission (NHC), which has the value of a ministry, has stopped publishing the daily figures of cases and deaths.

Now the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does this, but starting next week it will only do this once a month.

The authorities recently changed the criteria for attributing a death due to Covid.

Thus, only 15 such deaths have been reported in the country of 1.4 billion people since the lifting of restrictions on December 7.

What raise doubts about the ability of official Chinese figures to reflect reality, while hospitals and crematoriums are overwhelmed by an influx of patients and victims of Covid.

Authorities admitted last week that they were collecting “much less” data compared to the period during which large-scale tests were being carried out.

Performing a PCR test for Covid-19 in Shanghai on December 23, 2022 © Hector RETAMAL / AFP/Archives

To "fill in the gaps" in statistics, authorities rely on online surveys, hospital visits, requests for fever medication and emergency calls, according to disease control official Yin Wenwu .

Many countries including the United States, Australia and Canada cite the lack of transparency of Chinese data to justify their decision to impose PCR tests on travelers from China.

Parcel estimates

Some local authorities have started to publish figures: this is the case of the province of Zhejiang (east), bordering Shanghai, which estimated last week that a million new cases appeared every day.

The city of Qingdao (east) has reported 500,000 new daily infections, that of Dongguan (south) evokes 300,000.

In the island-province of Hainan (south), the authorities estimated Friday the contagion rate of the inhabitants at more than 50%, while the cities of Quzhou and Zhoushan (east) calculated that at least 30% of their population has caught the Covid.

One of the country's leading epidemiologists, Wu Zunyou, said on Thursday the peak had passed in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu (southwest) and Tianjin (north).

Agents wait to test for the Covid-19 coronavirus in Shanghai's Jing'an district on December 22, 2022 © HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP/Archives

Similar observation in Shanghai, where 10 of the 25 million inhabitants would have been infected according to epidemiologist Zhang Wenhong, one of the figures in the fight against the epidemic.

It is difficult to put all this partial data together to arrive at a complete picture of the national situation.

Figures leaked from a meeting of health authorities last month suggested 250 million infections in the first 20 days of December.

The independent projections are pessimistic.

Researchers from the University of Hong Kong predict that nearly a million Chinese could die from the virus this winter.

The British medical analysis company Airfinity, which estimates the number of daily deaths in China at 11,000 and contagions at 1.8 million per day, expects 1.7 million deaths by the end of April.

New variants?

Many countries are concerned about possible new variants and impose tests on travelers coming from China.

However, no new strain of Covid-19 has been detected.

According to Xu Wenbo, a CDC official, a new national database from hospital sample collection is in preparation.

The Omicron variant BA.5.2 and BF.7 sublineages remain dominant in Beijing, he said, in response to concerns that the more dangerous Delta variant is still circulating.

Omicron is in Shanghai.

In many Western countries, the XBB and BQ subvariants, which are more transmissible but not yet dominant in China, have taken over.

Last month, China submitted 384 samples of Omicron to the global Gisaid database, according to its website.

But the total number of samples from Beijing since the start of the epidemic (1,308) remains much lower than those from other countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Cambodia or Senegal.

Staff in protective suits help Chinese travelers to leave the arrival hall of Rome-Fiumicino International Airport, near Rome, on December 29, 2022, after being tested for the Covid-19 coronavirus © Filippo MONTEFORTE / AFP/Archives

The recent samples brought by Beijing "all strongly resemble the variants known and circulating in the world between July and December", according to Gisaid.

Virologist Jin Don-yan of the University of Hong Kong recently said in a podcast that the possibility of a more deadly variant emerging in China remains "very low".

© 2023 AFP