Estimated 1-1.5 million Covid deaths in China

Communist China claims to have less than 85,000 Covid deaths, the lowest per capita rate of any country during the pandemic. But researchers estimate the actual death toll at between one and 1.5 million. 

Your Thursday Briefing: 1.5 Million Covid Deaths in China? | New York Times - Amelia Nierenberg:

Feb. 15, 2023 - "After China relaxed the world’s most stringent Covid-19 restrictions in December, the virus exploded there. Four separate academic teams have come up with broadly similar estimates suggesting that one million to 1.5 million people died during the surge, far more than China’s official count.

"Researchers believe that the country’s official figure, as of Feb. 9, of 83,150 deaths during the entire pandemic is a vast undercount. That number would give China the lowest death rate per capita of any major country over the whole of the pandemic. But at the researchers’ estimated levels of mortality, China would already have surpassed the toll in many Asian countries that never clamped down as long or as aggressively. 

"The estimates also align more closely with the evidence of overwhelmed hospitals and crematories than the official figures do.

"Two of the estimates were in papers published in academic journals or posted for peer review. Two others were shared by epidemiologists in response to queries from The Times. All of the researchers consulted by The Times cautioned that without reliable data from China, the estimates should be understood as informed guesses.... 

"Some used past outbreaks in Hong Kong and Shanghai to estimate how quickly the virus might have spread in mainland China. Others used travel data and demographics to model spread and mortality. Scientists also used sampling data from China’s testing to infer that 90 percent of the population had been infected in little more than a month.... 

"One researcher started with a simple assumption, that the fatality rate for people infected in China was roughly the same as it was in the U.S. That means that if between 40 and 65 percent of China’s population was infected — a conservative estimate — then between 900,000 and 1.4 million Chinese people might have died, he said."

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/15/briefing/china-covid-deaths-scotland-asia.html