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How China’s (non) strategy against Covid changes (and kills).

1 year ago babelfish

How China's (non) strategy against Covid changes (and kills).

For China, the official deaths from Covid since the beginning of the pandemic are 5,242, a number that clashes with both common sense and the images that are spreading on social media. What is really happening and what do the experts predict?

China changes the definition of death from Covid and, while videos (whose veracity is not confirmed) spread on social networks of overloaded hospitals with patients kept in inhumane conditions and bodies wrapped in plastic bags, experts predict that the wave that is sweeping the country could kill a million people.

Beijing has so far said the official deaths from Covid since the start of the pandemic are 5,242.

HOW THE DEFINITION OF DEATH FROM COVID CHANGES IN CHINA

Only those who test positive and die solely of "respiratory failure" will be included in China's official Covid death numbers. According to Bloomberg , this was announced by Wang Guiqiang, a leading doctor in the field of infectious diseases, speaking with reporters yesterday at a briefing of the National Health Commission held in Beijing.

Patients deemed to have died from another illness or event, such as a heart attack, will no longer be counted, even if they were ill with Covid at the time.

Before the new definition, which China's health authority told Bloomberg was not yet in effect last week, anyone who died while testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, regardless of their underlying condition, was classified as a fatality. official from Covid.

WHY IT CHANGES

Beijing justified its choice by stating that the Omicron variant is milder than the original strain identified at the beginning of the pandemic in Wuhan. "Few have died from respiratory failure caused by Covid, and the most common cause of death is the underlying disease," Wang said.

The suspicion, however, is that China is changing the rules in the works because the overnight dismantling of the zero Covid policy is causing far more infections and deaths than it is reporting. The official numbers, in fact, are incredibly low.

The country has recorded fewer than 10 deaths since the start of the month, according to Bloomberg reports. A figure that, even for the US newspaper, clashes with images and videos that on social media show, especially in Beijing, crematoria and funeral homes in constant activity.

VIDEOS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

While the veracity of this material remains to be confirmed, what is being filmed is gruesome. Hospitals crammed with people on top of each other, even thrown on the floor for lack of beds,medicines that are in short supply and bodies packed in plastic bags.

Here, for example, is a video posted by the epidemiologist and New York Times journalist Eric Feigl-Ding, who in the long thread lets it be known that "epidemiologists estimate that 60% of the Earth's population will be infected in the next 90 days" and “the deaths will probably be millions, in the plural”.

WHAT EXPERTS PREDICT

In confirmation of what Ding said, a preprint study published in medrxiv and cited by Nature , believes that up to a million people in China could die from Covid in the coming months. The estimate could be reduced by 35% by administering the fourth dose of the vaccine, antiviral drugs to those at risk, maintaining the obligation to wear a mask and other temporary and targeted restrictions.

"But these estimates – observes Ewan Cameron of the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth – only include deaths due directly to Covid and do not take into account those in excess due to delays in the treatment of people suffering from different diseases".

Another projection estimates that China, if it continues on its current path, will face half a million deaths from Covid by April next year, with 1.6 million deaths by the end of the year. 2023.

Even more impressive are the numbers calculated by a study cited by Bloomberg , which speaks of 2.1 million deaths and peaks of 5.6 million infections per day.

Furthermore, if China is unable to contain this violent wave and needs to allocate its resources – such as masks or artificial ventilation systems – to the domestic market, the consequences could once again involve the whole world, exactly as they did three years ago.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/come-cambia-e-uccide-la-non-strategia-della-cina-contro-il-covid/ on Wed, 21 Dec 2022 10:14:37 +0000.