Funviralpark BEIJING (Reuters) – About 9,000 people are dying from the new coronavirus every day in China, UK-based health data company Airfinity said on Thursday. country with a large population.
COVID infections began spreading across China in November and picked up pace this month after Beijing scrapped its COVID-zero policy, which included regular PCR testing of its population and the release of data on asymptomatic cases.
In a statement, Airfinity said the cumulative death toll in China since December 1 has reached 100,000, with a total of 18.6 million likely infected. It said it was using modeling based on data from provinces in China before recent changes to case reporting were implemented.
Airfinity expects China’s COVID infections to reach its first peak on January 13 with 3.7 million cases per day.
This was after thousands of cases were reported daily by health officials after the nationwide network of PCR testing sites was largely dismantled as authorities shifted from infection prevention to treatment. In contrast to
Airfinity expects about 25,000 deaths per day on January 23, bringing the cumulative death toll since December to 584,000.
Officials have reported 10 COVID deaths since December 7, when China made an abrupt policy shift.
Health officials recently defined deaths from COVID-19 as individuals who died of respiratory failure due to COVID-19, saying they ruled out deaths from other diseases and conditions, even if the deceased tested positive for the virus.
As of December 28, China’s official COVID death toll was 5,246 since the start of the 2020 pandemic.
Airfinity expects 1.7 million deaths across China by the end of April, according to a statement.
In 2020, it built “the world’s first health analytics and intelligence platform dedicated to COVID-19,” according to its website.
Wu Zunyou, China’s chief epidemiologist, said on Thursday that a team at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to assess the death toll differently.
The team will measure the difference between the number of deaths in the current wave of infections and the number of deaths expected if the epidemic had not occurred, Wu said at a press conference.
By calculating the so-called “excess mortality rate,” Wu said, China could figure out what it might have potentially underestimated.
Reporting by Ryan Wu and Joe Cash. Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise
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