China is likely experiencing 1 million new COVID-19 cases and 5,000 deaths from the virus every day, as it grapples with what is expected to be the biggest outbreak of the disease the world has ever seen, a new analysis showed.
However, the situation could get even worse for the country of 1.4 billion people.
The number of daily cases might rise to 3.7 million next month, UK-based Airfinity Ltd said.
Photo: EPA-EFE / XINHUA / ZOU JINGYI
There would likely be another surge of cases that would push the daily peak to 4.2 million in March, the analytics company said.
Its modeling of the scale and toll of China’s outbreak, which uses provincial data, showed that the impact of the country’s abrupt pivot away from its “zero COVID-19” policy far exceeds the Chinese government’s tally.
Officially, China reported 2,966 new cases on Wednesday.
Photo: AFP
There have been fewer than 10 officially recognized COVID-19 deaths since the beginning of this month.
However, that contrasts with a growing chorus of reports that hospitals are being overwhelmed with patients and crematoriums are being pushed well beyond their capacity.
Changes to how the government reports virus figures is also a factor. China has largely shut down its vast network of mass-testing booths and scrapped efforts to include every single infection in the daily tally, leaving residents to rely on rapid tests with no obligation to report the results.
The country’s health regulator also quietly adopted a narrower definition for what is considered a COVID-19 death — and much more selective than what many Western nations use — making it difficult to gauge the real toll from the deluge of infections.
These changes mean “the official data is unlikely to be a true reflection of the outbreak being experienced across the country,” Airfinity vaccines and epidemiology head Louise Blair said in a statement. “This change could downplay the extent of deaths seen in China.”
Accurately capturing the COVID-19 situation remains difficult across the world, as a pivot to living with the virus means fewer countries test frequently.
The emergence last year of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 sparked a jump in infections, including in the US, which posted its highest daily case count to date at nearly 1.4 million infections in January.
That coincided with the global number exceeding 4 million, Our World in Data figures showed.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS