China’s COVID deaths go uncounted amid “information blackhole”

China’s official statistics came under intense scrutiny from the general public on Monday after reporting the first COVID-related deaths in over two weeks amid an explosive wave of infections across the country.

The two fatalities, which were recorded in Beijing in the 24 hours of December 18, were the first deaths attributed to the virus since December 3. Before that, the National Health Commission reported only 11 COVID-related deaths among China’s 1.4 billion people since November 19.

On Weibo, one of China’s main social media websites, the hashtag “Beijing reports 2 additional deaths” had been read 460 million times at the time of publication. At 5,237, China’s COVID death toll is very low by international standards, and sections of the Chinese public have questioned the latest numbers.

The official figure was in stark contrast to the lived experiences of many in Beijing, a city of 22 million people, where pharmacies have reported a run on fever medicines, hospitals have been overwhelmed, and millions are thought to have already caught and recovered from the highly transmissible Omicron strain.

Over the weekend, funeral homes and crematoriums in the Chinese capital told news outlets including Reuters and the Financial Times that their staff were struggling to handle the influx of dozens of confirmed or suspected COVID victims each day, while the NHC’s official count remained at zero.

“You know the data is inaccurate. I also know the data is inaccurate. The data cannot possibly be accurate. What’s the point of reporting the data?” one Weibo user said of Monday’s two COVID deaths. Another commenter said the number was “missing at least three zeros.”

But Beijing also wasn’t the only city scrambling to properly track infections. In Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province, the municipal health authority said 43 positive cases were recorded on December 16, and on the same day a single hospital’s fever clinic admitted more than 600 COVID-positive patients, according to the Qianjiang Evening News.

Sing Tao Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper, said on Monday that the real state of the pandemic in China was mired in an “information blackhole.”

Trusted Chinese news site Caixin, known for its investigative journalism, offered an insight into the low official death toll on Sunday when it reported knowledge of new guidelines issued on December 6, the day before the central government announced its abrupt reversal of zero-tolerance virus restrictions nationwide.

The notice by China’s pandemic task force gave medical institutions 24 hours to ascertain that COVID—not underlying conditions that may have been exacerbated by the virus—was the cause of death, Caixin said. Previously, patients who died, but had tested positive for the virus were added to the official count.

Last Friday, the outlet reported on the deaths of two state media journalists after they had contracted the virus. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Beijing intended to include them in the official statistics.

The NHC, which previously revised China’s death toll in April 2020, couldn’t be reached for comment.

In the absence of authoritative data points, Chinese internet users have been relying on other metrics to gauge the size and trajectory of China’s outbreak. Search engine prompts for funeral homes spiked in Beijing last week, analysis showed.

Another widely shared Weibo poll of 12,808 people suggested the wave might have already passed its peak in some parts of the country, with around two-thirds of respondents in Beijing and the neighboring province of Hebei saying they had tested positive.

In Sichuan and Chongqing in the southwest, that number fell to just over half of respondents, while less than 15 percent of people in the eastern port city of Shanghai said they had been infected.

The Communist Party’s leading newspaper, the People’s Daily, hailed President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy policy as a success this week for effectively shielding the Chinese public from the worst excesses of the virus for three years.

Critics, however, said the excesses of Xi’s signature strategy ended up throttling the economy.

Beijing’s message has sought to give the impression that the exit from zero COVID was happening on its terms. Leading health experts close to the government have also reversed pervious warnings about the Omicron variant, which they have now said was milder than the flu.

The World Health Organization dismissed suggestions that cases were only rising in China because it had finally abandoned its strict pandemic controls.

“There’s a narrative at the moment that China lifted the restrictions and all of a sudden the disease is out of control,” Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director, told reporters last week. “The disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease. And I believe China decided strategically that was not the best option anymore.”

This past spring, during the citywide lockdown of 25 million people in Shanghai, Beijing criticized WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and called his remarks irresponsible after he insisted China’s zero-COVID policy was unsustainable.

Government statistics from late November showed China’s two-dose vaccination rate was above 90 percent. However, less than 60 percent of adults were boosted, including only 40 percent of its 36 million senior citizens above the age of 80.

Recent studies said the Chinese public’s lack of natural or hybrid immunity could have implications for how China’s population handles the fast-moving wave. A model published on December 16 by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, at the University of Washington in Seattle, projected 322,000 COVID deaths by April.

At a public health press briefing on Sunday, Zhang Wenhong, a specialist dubbed “China’s Fauci,” said China’s “largest wave of COVID infections in history” would likely continue until next spring.

“We need to prepare for a wave that lasts two to four months,” said Zhang, who heads the infectious diseases department at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai.

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