HONG KONG—China’s central health authority has stopped publishing daily Covid-19 data, ending a three-year effort that has drawn mounting criticism for massively underreporting the surge in infections now sweeping the country.
In a one-line announcement Sunday, China’s National Health Commission said it would no longer issue its daily report on Covid infections and deaths. Relevant Covid information will instead be published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention for reference and research, it said, without giving any further information.
In its final daily report Saturday, the commission said there were just over 4,100 locally transmitted cases recorded the prior day, and no deaths.
Doubts over the reliability of China’s health data have persisted for years, but there has been a widening gulf between the official numbers and anecdotal evidence of spiraling infections on the ground. Hospitals and crematoriums are filling up, while pharmacies in many big cities have run out of fever and cold medicines as people fall sick, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
“They don’t have reliable data to report anyway,” University of Hong Kong epidemiologist Ben Cowling said, pointing to Beijing’s decision this month to stop widespread virus testing. The lack of data means authorities cannot accurately predict when infections will peak, which would hinder their ability to devise appropriate measures in response, he said.
China’s leaders in early December abruptly abandoned the so-called zero-Covid restrictions that aimed to quickly identify, isolate and crush outbreaks, arguing that the virus had evolved to become less deadly than when it first emerged in the city of Wuhan almost three years ago.
Beijing’s Covid response task force, headed by the city’s Communist Party secretary, said Friday that the nation’s capital must use all means possible to increase the proportion of people who have recovered from the coronavirus while reducing…
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