During China’s massive wave of infections, 248 million people, or 18 percent of the population, contracted the virus in December, according to officially unconfirmed internal estimates, according to notes circulating on social media from a meeting of China’s National Health Commission. Beijing on Wednesday. According to expert forecasts, hundreds of thousands of deaths are expected.
According to this report, 37 million people have been infected this Tuesday alone. Those involved in the discussion confirmed information from the Bloomberg news agency and the Financial Times. The estimates come from the vice director of the health department, Sun Yang, as reported by the Financial Times.
More than half of Beijing’s residents are infected
According to him, the virus continues to spread rapidly among billions of people. More than half of the 81 million inhabitants of Sichuan province in southwest China or the 21 million in the capital Beijing are infected. The official statistics for the said three weeks of December list only 62,000 infections across the country.
While hospitals are overcrowded and many crematoriums can no longer cremate the corpses fast enough, the official figures no longer give any insight into the true size of the wave of infection.
The restrictions increasingly weighed on the economy
After nearly three years of lockdowns, enforced quarantines and mass testing, the most populous country abruptly lifted its hardline zero-Covid policy on December 7. The reason for the turnaround was that the infections with the new Omicron variants were no longer as serious. But experts saw the reason mainly in the fact that the strict measures could no longer be maintained in view of the explosive spread. The restrictions also placed increasing pressure on the second-largest economy.
After Chinese experts used to warn about the dangers of the coronavirus to justify the zero-Covid policy, the seriousness of the disease has been downplayed since the change of course. Leading government adviser and renowned epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan even suggested calling Covid-19 simply the “corona cold.”
Source: Krone
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