![]() Officials reported fewer than 40 local deaths during the month prior to January 8, despite a widespread national outbreak across what was then the world’s most populous country.Ĭhina later that month revised its criteria, yet its figures still only included people who had tested positive for the virus and died in hospitals, excluding those who died at home or at certain lower-level and rural health facilities. ![]() Ou Dongqu/Xinhua/Getty Images/FILEĬhinese cities are struggling to pay their bills as 'hidden debts' soarĪt that time, Chinese health officials only listed those Covid patients who succumbed with respiratory failure and pneumonia as having died of Covid. The Wujiang Bridge in the city of Zunyi in the southwest province of Guizhou on Nov. In January, a top WHO official accused China of “under-representing” the severity of its Covid outbreak, and repeated the agency’s critique of Beijing’s “narrow” definition of what constitutes a Covid death. Huang said “any information that contradicts that conclusion would make that official narrative incoherent,” adding that this doesn’t bode well for future releases of accurate information, including cremation data.Ĭhina has faced criticism of its data transparency throughout the pandemic, including how it counts Covid-19 deaths. In February, as the winter surge was winding down, China’s ruling Communist Party’s top decision-making body said its handling of the virus had “created a miracle in human history” as it had “successfully pulled through a pandemic.” While the rest of the world was hit by Covid before the advent of vaccines, China’s tight border controls kept the virus largely at bay after its initial outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, until more transmissible variants made that policy increasingly unsustainable and damaging. Since the early days of the pandemic, Chinese officials have claimed a low death rate comparable to other places in the world, which they argued showed the success of China’s approach to Covid-19. Patients on stretchers are seen at a Shanghai hospital on January 3, 2023. In reality, the outbreak overwhelmed crematoriums, packed hospitals and left people scrambling for scarce medicines, exposing the government’s lack of preparation for its policy U-turn, which followed rising economic costs and unprecedented public protests against its far-reaching controls. The omission underscores the lack of comprehensive data on fatalities during the country’s mass Covid-19 outbreak, which began late last year after authorities abruptly lifted stringent pandemic controls – effectively allowing the virus to rip through its 1.4 billion population.Įxperts have said the country’s official data on deaths likely significantly underestimates how many people succumbed to the virus during that time, which Chinese officials have since claimed as part of their “major and decisive victory” over the pandemic. The national number of cremations was omitted from recent data from China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs, which tracks a range of social indicators in quarterly reports.Ī review of the past 10 years of ministry data shows the annual figure of cremations was consistently included in the fourth quarter data report – until now. ![]() China has failed to release data on how many cremations took place in the country at the end of 2022 – obscuring a key indicator that could have shed light on the impact of the wave of Covid-19 infections that were sweeping the country at that time. ![]()
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