Hong Kong
CNN
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About 250 million people in China may have been infected with Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times reported on Friday.

If estimates that CNN cannot independently confirm are correct, it accounts for about 18% of China’s 1.4 billion population, representing the world’s largest Covid-19 outbreak to date.

The figures cited were released Wednesday at an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission (NHC). Stated.

On Friday, a copy of an alleged NHC meeting memo was circulated on Chinese social media and was seen by CNN. The document’s authenticity has not been confirmed, and the NHC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Both the Financial Times and Bloomberg have detailed the officials’ discussion of how to deal with the epidemic.

Among the estimates cited in both reports, it was revealed that 37 million people were newly infected with Covid-19 across China on Tuesday alone. This contrasted with his official number of 3,049 new cases reported that day.

The Financial Times, citing two people familiar with the matter, said Sun Yang, deputy director of the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presented the figures to officials at a closed-door briefing.

Sun explained that the spread of Covid in China was still rising, and estimated that more than half the population of Beijing and Sichuan provinces had already been infected, according to the Financial Times.

The estimates follow China’s decision in early December to abruptly end its draconian zero-coronavirus policy that had been in place for almost three years.

The figure is in stark contrast to the NHC’s public data, which reported just 62,592 symptomatic Covid cases in the first 20 days of December.

It’s unclear how the NHC came up with the estimates cited by Bloomberg and the Financial Times. China no longer officially tallies the total number of infections after officials said they would shut down the nationwide network of PCR testing booths and stop collecting data. Asymptomatic case.

People in China are now using rapid antigen tests to detect infection and are not obligated to report positive results.

Officially, China has only reported eight Covid deaths this month. This is a surprisingly low figure given the rapid spread of the virus and the relatively low vaccination rate among older people.

According to CNN calculations of new figures released by the NHC on December 14, only 42.3% of those over 80 in China received the third dose of the vaccine.

In the face of growing skepticism that it is downplaying the death toll from COVID-19, the Chinese government has announced that it has updated the way it counts deaths from the virus, bolstering the official tally. defended accuracy.

According to the latest NHC guidelines, only deaths from pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting the virus are classified as deaths from Covid, Wang Guiqiang, a top doctor for infectious diseases, said at a news conference on Tuesday.

The minutes of an undisclosed NHC meeting on Wednesday did not mention any discussion of how many people may have died in China, according to both reports and documents seen by CNN.

“The numbers look plausible, but I don’t have any other data sources to compare them with. [them] When. If the estimated number of infections referred to here is accurate, it means that a nationwide peak will occur within the next week,” said Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong. He told CNN via email when asked about what would be done. .