On January 5, there were 128,000 serious cases of covid-19 in China, which on Thursday the 12th dropped to 105,000. However, between December 8 and January 12, the Asian giant registered 59,938 deaths associated with the disease.
China announced this Saturday that in five weeks it has registered 59,938 deaths associated with covid-19.
Specifically, the figure includes the period between December 8 to January 12just after the end of its severe restrictions, on December 7.
The figures were shared by China’s National Sanitary Commission, which set the average age of death in 80.3 yearsaccording to the newspaper Global Times.
They also indicated that 90.1% of the deceased were over 65 years of age and that 90% suffered from underlying diseases.
The agency clarified that it performs PCR tests to classify patient deaths as related to covid-19 and that the causes of deaths from the virus were respiratory failure (5,503) or underlying diseases that worsen after developing covid-19 (54,435).
Peak of covid-19 in China
The agency also assured this Saturday that the serious cases of covid-19 in the current outbreak spread throughout the country reached its peak on January 5, about three weeks after the authorities relaxed the “zero covid” policy that they had maintained until then.
That day there were 128,000 serious cases, but the commission assured that on Thursday the 12th it dropped to 105,000.
The rapid spread in China in recent weeks has sown doubts about the reliability of official figureswhich until now had only reported a handful of recent deaths from the disease despite numerous scenes of high hospital pressure.
The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, claimed last week that China is not giving complete figures of deaths from covid-19 in the current outbreak, which makes it impossible to know the true scope of the disease, even globally.
China defends that it has shared its data “in an open, timely and transparent manner” since the start of the pandemic and has asked the international community to avoid “politicizing the pandemic” as a result of the restrictions imposed on travelers from the Asian country, such as the requirement of some countries to present PCR tests before traveling.
According to a study by Peking University, around 900 million people have been infected with covid-19 in China after the country dismantled the “zero covid” policy and opted for more lax control of the pandemic.
However, others Chinese experts believe that the peak incidence of covid cases in China will continue “until February or March”as recently predicted by the former chief epidemiologist of the China Center for Disease Control, Zeng Guang.