Shanghai, China (EFE) and Prevention of Diseases (CDC) of the country, Wu Zunyou.
Taking into account the recent official population estimate of some 1,411.75 million people in the country at the end of 2022, the percentage offered by the epidemiologist would place the number of cases at about 1,129.4 million.
The figure exceeds the estimate offered a little over a week ago by a Peking University study, which spoke of some 900 million infections until January 11.
In a message published this Saturday on his Weibo social network account -the local equivalent of Twitter, censored in the country-, Wu relied on these data to predict that the risk of a second wave of infections occurring in the next two or three months is “very small.”
Regarding the risk derived from “the 5,000 million displacements” expected for the first Lunar New Year without anti-covid restrictions, Wu acknowledged that the numbers of infections could increase in some areas, but ruled out that there will be a “large rebound”. scale”.
In recent weeks, some voices have questioned the veracity of the figures offered by China, which at the moment acknowledges almost 73,000 deaths of covid patients in hospitals between December 8 and January 19.
This balance of deaths contrasts with estimates such as those of the British health sector analysis company Airfinity, which recently assured that some 36,000 deaths could be reached per day during the Lunar New Year holidays -from January 21 to 27- in China.
After almost three years of harsh restrictions, confinements and practically total closure of borders that ended up crystallizing in protests in various parts of the country, China began to dismantle the ‘zero covid’ at the beginning of December, and on January 8 it reduced the category A -level of maximum danger- to B the management of the disease, thus marking the end of this strategy in practice.
Balance of deaths from covid
The Chinese health authorities announced a total of 12,658 covid-related deaths in hospitals between January 13 and 19, increasing the official balance to 72,596 since last December 8, when the authorities began to dismantle the policy of ‘ zero covid’.
Among these almost 13,000 deaths, the Asian country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) differentiates between 681 caused directly by covid and another 11,977 in cases in which other underlying ailments also had an influence.
The latest update from the institution reports more than 470,000 hospitalized for covid throughout the country, of which some 52,000 were seriously ill.
Since the end of December, China stopped publishing daily bulletins on the evolution of infections and deaths from covid to do so on a weekly basis, partly because the end of routine PCR tests for the population made it impossible to know the spread of the virus from precise way.
In recent weeks, some voices have questioned the veracity of the death figures offered by China, which contrast with estimates such as those of the British health sector analysis company Airfinity, which recently assured that some 36,000 could be reached. deaths per day during the Lunar New Year holidays -from January 21 to 27- in the country.