Shanghai, China’s largest city and financial hub, is at the epicenter of the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak since the virus emerged in Wuhan more than two years ago.
The city of 26 million people has entered a fourth week under strict confinementwith residents confined to their homes and increasingly angry, frustrated and rebellious.
Beijing has staunchly defended its “zero-COVID”, with its massive bans and radical tests. China repeatedly cites its low death toll as proof of the superiority of the “Chinese model.” But experts have questioned China’s official COVID data since the pandemic began.
On April 21, Shanghai reported 11 official deaths from COVID-19bringing the total for this wave of Omicron variant infections to 36, shockingly low compared to the more than 400,000 infections reported so far.
For comparison, Hong Kong has a population less than a third the size of Shanghai. When Omicron swept through in January, nearly 9,000 were reported to have died among 1.18 million cases.
According The New York Times, Shanghai’s growth in infections closely tracked that of Hong Kong. Both have large elderly populations, including many are not fully vaccinated.
What is happening?
Claims of unreported COVID-19 deaths are circulating on social media. Those reports are often censored. China also strictly defines what a death caused by COVID is. A broader measure known as “excess deaths,” those above normal levels, suggests a much higher number of COVID.
On March 31, The Wall Street Journal reported on a significant gap in reporting: “The Shanghai government has not reported any COVID-related deaths or outbreaks at its hundreds of elderly care facilities since cases began to rise in the city in March,” the newspaper reported.
Nurses at one facility said they had “witnessed or heard of the recent removal of multiple bodies from the facility, where they said at least 100 patients had tested positive for COVID-19.”
According to the Associated PressChinese outlets such as Caixin and The Paper also reported on those deaths, but their reports were quickly censored. The AP also reported on the case of Muying Lu, a 99-year-old man who died on April 1 at a government quarantine center in Shanghai after testing positive for the virus.
Lu’s family told the news agency that doctors said she died because the virus had worsened her underlying heart disease and high blood pressure. However, that was not enough to be attributed to COVID-19 in the city’s official tally.
“Interviews with family members of patients who have tested positive, a publicly released phone call with a government health official, and an internet archive compiled by the families of the dead raise issues about how the city is counting its cases and deaths, which it almost certainly results in a marked undercount,” the AP wrote of the Shanghai statistics.
In fact, China does not count cases where COVID-19 simply contributes to or exacerbates the conditions that cause death.
Zhengming Chen, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University, told The New York Times that mainland China only counts those who die directly from COVID-related pneumonia. Zuofeng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, confirmed this to the AP.
“If the deaths could be attributed to an underlying disease, they will always report it as such and not count it as a COVID-related death,” Dongyan Jin, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, also told the AP. “That is his pattern for many years.”
That counting method differs from the rest of the world.
In most countries, including the United States, health authorities follow the rules according to the World Health Organization (WHO) International guidelines for the Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as a Cause of Death.
Unlike China’s method, the WHO specifies that deaths in which COVID-19 is a contributing cause should be counted.
“COVID-19 must be recorded on the medical certificate of cause of death for ALL decedents where the disease caused, or is presumed to have caused or contributed to death,” the guidelines state.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) stipulate that fatality counts include “deaths with COVID-19 as underlying or contributing causes” and “deaths with confirmed or suspected COVID-19.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 90% of the 990,592 recorded COVID-19 deaths in the United States as of April 16, 2022, designated COVID-19 as the underlying cause, meaning that COVID-19 was the disease that “started the train of morbid events leading straight to death. ”
“If you apply international criteria”, Chen, Oxford epidemiologist told the Times, “the number of dead would be somewhat high.” According A study Chen, co-author, COVID-19 deaths in Wuhan during the first three months of 2020 were likely 16 percent higher than China’s tally.
In response to AP questions about Shanghai’s COVID-19 counts, China’s top health authority, the National Health Commission, said “there is no basis to suspect the accuracy of China’s epidemic data and statistics.” ”.
To be sure, studies have found that official COVID-19 death counts appear to be grossly understated and underreported almost everywhere in the world, including the United States.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers who calculated “excess deaths,” which are based on a comparison of overall deaths during the pandemic and historical trends.
The British news weekly The Economist built one such statistical model to measure “excess deaths” and estimate how far off official counts may be.
The disparities varied from country to country. For example, The Economist model estimated that the US underestimated COVID-19 deaths by 20%, Russia by 200%, India by 1,000%, and Pakistan by 2,800%.
China does not track excess deaths, and The Economist appears to have removed its estimate of excess deaths for China. However, on January 2, the data scientist George Calhoun quoted The Economist model and estimated that the official tally of COVID-19 deaths in China was off by 17,000%.
“The Economist estimates that the true number of COVID deaths in China is not 4,636, but something like 1.7 million,” Calhoun wrote.
Others say The Economist’s model has shortcomings, including a lack of good Chinese data.
“It would be nice if we had similar data from China, where the virus originated,” Calhoun wrote in a subsequent Forbes article published on January 11. “Beijing refuses to provide them.”
Reference-www.polygraph.info