About 500,000 people in the Chinese city of Qingdao are being infected with COVID-19 every day, a senior health official said on Friday, in a rare and quickly censored acknowledgement that the country’s wave of infections is not reflected in official data.
China this month has rapidly dismantled key pillars of its “zero COVID-19” strategy, doing away with snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and travel curbs in a jarring reversal of its hallmark containment strategy.
Cities across China have struggled to cope as surging infections have emptied pharmacy shelves, filled hospital wards, and appeared to cause backlogs at crematoriums and funeral homes.
Photo: EPA-EFE
However, the end of strict testing mandates has made caseloads virtually impossible to track, while authorities have narrowed the medical definition of a COVID-19 death in a move experts have said would suppress the number of fatalities attributable to the virus.
A news outlet operated by the Chinese Communist Party in Qingdao on Friday reported the municipal health chief as saying that the eastern city was seeing “between 490,000 and 530,000” new COVID-19 cases a day.
The coastal city of about 10 million people was “in a period of rapid transmission ahead of an approaching peak,” Qingdao Public Health Bureau Deputy Director Bo Tao (薄濤) reportedly said, adding that the infection rate would likely increase by 10 percent over the weekend.
Photo: AFP
The report was shared by several other news outlets, but appeared to have been edited by yesterday morning to remove the case figures.
The Chinese National Health Commission yesterday said that 4,103 new domestic cases were recorded nationwide the previous day, with no new deaths.
Bo’s statement came two days after UK-based analytics company Airfinity Ltd estimated that the whole of China was seeing about 1 million COVID-19 cases per day.
In Shandong, the province where Qingdao is, authorities officially logged just 31 new domestic cases.
The Chinese government keeps a tight leash on the country’s media, with legions of online censors on hand to scrub content deemed politically sensitive.
Most government-run publications have downplayed the severity of the country’s COVID-19 wave, instead depicting the policy reversal as logical and controlled.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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