British health data company Airfinity, based in the United Kingdom, said on Thursday that about 9,000 people in China are likely to die from the emerging corona virus (Covid-19), which is almost doubling its estimates from last week, as infections spread to most parts of the world. densely populated nation.
COVID infections began spreading across China in November, accelerating this month after Beijing loosened its COVID-free policies including regular PCR testing on its residents and publishing data on asymptomatic cases.
Airfinity said in a statement that the number of cumulative deaths in China since December 1 has likely reached 100,000, with total infections at 18.6 million. It says it uses modeling based on data from Chinese provinces before implementing recent changes to reporting cases.
Airfinity expects COVID infections in China to first peak on January 13 with 3.7 million cases per day.
This is in contrast to the many thousands of cases reported daily by health authorities, after a nationwide network of PCR testing sites was largely dismantled as authorities shifted from preventing infections to treating them.
Airfinity expects deaths to peak on January 23 of around 25,000 people per day, with the cumulative death toll reaching 584,000 since December.
Since December 7, when China made a sudden policy turn, the authorities have reported 10 deaths from the coronavirus.
Health officials recently said they define a COVID death as a person dying of respiratory failure caused by COVID-19, excluding deaths from other diseases and conditions even if the decedent tested positive for the virus.
As of December 28, the official death toll from coronavirus in China is 5,246 since the beginning of the epidemic in 2020.
Airfinity expects 1.7 million people will have died across China by the end of April, according to its statement.
According to its website, in 2020 it built “the world’s first dedicated COVID-19 health intelligence and analytics platform”.
China’s chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyu said Thursday that a team at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention plans to assess deaths differently.
Wu told reporters at a briefing that the team will measure the difference between the number of deaths in the current wave of infections and the number of deaths expected if the epidemic never occurred.
Wu said that by calculating the so-called “excess deaths,” China will be able to identify what could have been underestimated.
Reporting by Ryan Wu and Joe Cash. Editing by Emilia Sithole Matares
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