WHO appeals to China to release more COVID-19 information

The World Health Organization has appealed to China to keep releasing information about its wave of COVID-19 infections after the government announced nearly 60,000 deaths since early December following weeks of complaints it was failing to tell the world what was happening.

The announcement over the weekend was the first official death toll since the ruling Communist Party abruptly dropped anti-virus restrictions in December despite a surge in infections that flooded hospitals, the Associated Press reported.

The surge in infections left the WHO and other governments appealing for information, while the United States, South Korea and others imposed controls on visitors from China.

The government said 5,503 people died of respiratory failure caused by COVID-19 and there were 54,435 fatalities from cancer, heart disease and other ailments combined with COVID-19 between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12.

The announcement “allows for a better understanding of the epidemiological situation,” said a WHO statement. It said the WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, talked by phone with Health Minister Ma Xiaowei.

“WHO requested that this type of detailed information continued to be shared with us and the public,” the agency said.

The National Health Commission said only deaths in hospitals were counted, which means anyone who died at home wouldn’t be included. It gave no indication when or whether it might release updated numbers.

Meanwhile experts told Bloomberg that the reported death toll by China may underestimate the true toll by hundreds of thousands.

Experts say it’s likely to be an underestimate given the enormous scale of the outbreak and the mortality rates seen at the height of omicron waves in other countries that initially pursued a COVID Zero strategy.

“This reported number of COVID-19 deaths might be the tip of the iceberg,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at University of California, Los Angeles.

While the figure is roughly in line with what Zhang estimated might be coming from the country’s hospitals, he said it’s only a fraction of the total COVID deaths across the country.

Using a report from the National School of Development at Peking University that found 64 percent of the population was infected by mid-January, he estimated 900,000 people would have died in the previous five weeks based on a conservative 0.1 percent case fatality rate, Bloomberg reported. That means the official hospital death count is less than 7 percent of the total mortality seen during the outbreak.

The official toll translates to 1.17 deaths daily for every million people in the country over the course of five weeks, according to a Bloomberg analysis. That’s well below the average daily mortality rate seen in other countries that initially pursued COVID Zero or managed to contain the virus after relaxing their pandemic rules.

When omicron hit South Korea, daily deaths quickly climbed to nearly seven for every 1 million people.

Australia and New Zealand saw mortality nearing or topping four per million a day during their first winters with omicron.

Even Singapore, which had a well-planned and gradual shift away from its zero-tolerance approach, had deaths peak at about two per million people daily.