COVID-19: China records almost 13,000 deaths in one week

Almost 13,000 COVID-19-related hospital deaths were reported in China between January 13 and January 19, after a top health official claimed that the majority of the population had already contracted the virus.

Since Beijing abruptly ended anti-virus controls last month, there has been widespread skepticism over official data. A week earlier, China claimed that nearly 60,000 people had died from COVID-19 in hospitals as of January 12.

According to a statement released on Saturday by China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over the course of the period, 11,977 people died from other diseases that were also caused by an infection, including 681 hospitalized patients who passed away from respiratory failure brought on by COVID-19 infection.

The statistics do not reflect people who passed away at home due to the infection.

Over the Lunar New Year break, according to Airfinity, the number of COVID-19 deaths per day in China would peak at over 36,000.

The company also calculated that since China abandoned the zero-COVID-19 policy in December, more than 600,000 individuals have passed away from the illness.

To celebrate the greatest festival in the lunar calendar, which fell on Sunday, tens of millions of people have recently traveled across the nation for eagerly anticipated family reunions, prompting concerns about new outbreaks.

Although millions of people will return to their villages to celebrate the Lunar New Year, a top health official said that China won't see a second wave of COVID-19 infections in the next two to three months because about 80% of the population has already contracted the virus.

“Although a large number of people traveling during the Spring Festival may promote the spread of the epidemic to a certain extent… the current wave of the epidemic has already infected about 80 percent of the people in the country,” Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a post on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform on Saturday.

“In the short term, for example, in the next two to three months, the possibility of… a second wave of the epidemic across the country is very small.”

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