This Chinese City Reports Half A Million New Covid-19 Cases Everyday: Official

Nearly half a million people are being infected with Covid-19 every day in this Chinese city, a senior health official said, in a rare acknowledgement that was soon censored by the authority. He further added that the country's official Covid-19 data and statistics are not being reported.

A news outlet operated by the ruling 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 cases a day.

Different sets of data modelling indicate that China could be facing a massive death toll from a surge in cases after it lifted its stringent zero-COVID policy.

According to a recent report in The Economist, around 1.5 million Chinese could die based on its model that calculates the trajectory of the country’s outbreak under different scenarios based on estimates of the rates at which people become infected, get sick, recover or die – referred to as the SEIR model.

Those figures tally with other recent modelling, including a report in ‘The Lancet’ journal from last week quoting analysis by Airfinity, a UK-based science information and analytics company, which projected that somewhere between 1.3 and 2.1 million people could die from COVID-19 after China re-opens.

China's National Health Commission said Saturday that 4,103 new domestic infections were recorded nationwide the previous day, with no new deaths.

China's government continues to keep a tight leash on the country's media, with legions of online censors on hand to scrub out content deemed politically sensitive. Most government-run publications have downplayed the severity of the country's exit wave, instead depicting the policy reversal as logical and controlled.

(with PTI inputs)