China censors health chief’s ‘half a million people infected’ daily remark, stops publishing Covid numbers

World Health Organisation hasn’t received any data from China either

China was quick to censor the remark of a senior health official that around “half a million people a day were being infected with Covid-19 in a single city”, and stopped publishing its daily Covid numbers, reports said.

The health official added that the country’s wave of infections is not being reflected in official statistics.

However, the remark was quickly censored, followed by China's national health commission halting the publication of the Covid-19 data on Sunday.

"Relevant Covid information will be published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention for reference and research," the commission said in a statement, without specifying the reasons for the change.

The commission did not clarify how frequently CDC will update the Covid information.

The news comes amid a new and deadly Covid wave in China where as many as 250 million people have been infected with the disease this month, according to reports based on leaked official estimates, as the country’s health system struggled with the surge.

The figure – about 18 per cent of the entire population – includes 37 million who were infected on 20 December alone, according to Sun Yang, a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, whose estimates were leaked and reported in the Financial Times, Bloomberg and elsewhere.

China began dismantling its strict Covid controls this month, becoming the last major country to do so.

On Sunday, China’s industrial province of Zhejiang said it was battling around a million new daily infections, a number expected to double in the days ahead.

Citizens and experts called for more accurate data as infections surged after Beijing made sweeping changes to a zero-Covid policy that had put hundreds of millions of its citizens under relentless lockdowns and battered the world’s second-largest economy.

But the loosening of measures has seen a dramatic rise in cases as citizens leave factories and apartment blocks and travel for the first time in months.

The NHC’s pause on not reporting daily infection and death rates comes as a concern since Beijing made changes to a zero-Covid policy.

Despite the record surge of infections, the NHC had reported no Covid deaths nationwide for four consecutive days before halting the data release.

China also narrowed its definition for reporting Covid deaths, counting only those from Covid-caused pneumonia or respiratory failure, raising eyebrows among world health experts.

The World Health Organisation hasn’t received any data from China either.

The organisation says the data gap might be due to the authorities struggling to tally cases in the world's most populous country.

Additional reporting by agencies