China on Tuesday reported zero COVID-19 deaths for the first time since it began publishing daily figures on infection rates in January, and at midnight on Wednesday it lifted the lockdown on Wuhan.
While China appears to be experiencing a downward trend of the virus, the governments of Taiwan and other nations around the world should treat the news with extreme caution for a number of reasons.
First, it is important to recognize that Beijing has a long history of massaging statistics, most notably its own economic data. Many observers believe China routinely exaggerates GDP growth by about 2 percent.
Concerns that China has been cooking the books on COVID-19 infection data were given added weight on Wednesday last week, when Bloomberg reported the leak of a classified US intelligence report for the White House on China’s accounting of the virus.
The report concluded that Beijing had been intentionally under-reporting total cases and deaths, and that its data is “fake.”
It is certainly in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party to play down the crisis — to mitigate the damage of its initial cover-up, get China’s economy moving again, and provide good news for both internal and external consumption.
Second, there is increasing evidence to suggest that Chinese-made COVID-19 testing kits are inaccurate. The Slovak government purchased 1.2 million Chinese antibody testing kits for 15 million euros (US$16 million). On delivery they were found to be unreliable and unable to detect COVID-19 in its early stages.
Other European nations, including Spain, the Czech Republic and Turkey, have also returned Chinese testing kits after finding them to be faulty. Turkish officials reported an accuracy rate of less than 35 percent for the first batch of testing kits the nation received.
Coupled with reports from within China during the early stages of the outbreak that testing kits were inaccurate and were returning false negatives, this indicates a further problem with the reliability of Chinese data.
Third, many people infected with COVID-19 are asymptomatic. This makes accurately measuring the spread of the virus within a population extremely difficult.
China’s National Health Commission, as of Wednesday last week, had changed the way it reports COVID-19 data eight times and now it includes asymptomatic infections in its daily figures.
From Tuesday last week to Tuesday, 68 percent of confirmed cases in China showed no symptoms.
This initial dataset indicates that the stealthy nature of the virus is going to pose a significant problem for China’s government as travel restrictions are lifted and people return to work.
Fourth, many experts worry that the lifting of China’s lockdown measures could trigger a second wave of the virus, as the strict quarantine measures might have prevented the buildup of herd immunity.
Raina MacIntyre, a biosecurity professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, told Bloomberg that even if there had been many times more cases than officially reported by the Chinese government, less than 1 percent of the population would have been infected in its first wave, “leaving most people in China susceptible.”
“The global pandemic will not be contained until we have a vaccine, or most of the population is infected,” MacIntyre added.
David Heymann, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine agreed: “The concern is what will happen after they end these measures.”
It seems likely that reports of China having beaten the virus will prove to be a false dawn.
In Taiwan, we must remain vigilant: The world is not yet out of the woods.
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