WHO: China ‘under-representing’ true impact of Covid outbreak

• WHO wants China’s hospitalization and mortality data ASAP.
• WHO disputes China’s “narrow” definition of Covid fatality.
• Over Lunar New Year, experts fear the epidemic could spread to rural areas.

Top global health experts have urged Beijing to provide more information about the explosive spread as the World Health Organization has accused China of “under-representing” the severity of its Covid outbreak and challenged its “limited” definition of what defines a Covid fatality.

“We continue to ask China for more rapid, regular, reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive, real-time viral sequencing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a media briefing in Geneva Wednesday.

“WHO is concerned about the risk to life in China and has reiterated the importance of vaccination, including booster doses, to protect against hospitalization, severe disease, and death,” he said.

More specifically, Mike Ryan, WHO’s Executive Director for Health Emergencies, claimed that the figures currently provided by China “under-represent the full effect of the disease” in terms of admissions to hospitals and ICUs as well as fatalities.

He recognized that hospital data reporting has lagged in many nations, but he pointed to China’s “limited” definition of a Covid death as a contributing factor.

Only those Covid patients who passed away from respiratory failure are listed as having died from Covid in the nation.

Less than 20 local Covid cases-related deaths were reported in China in the two weeks before January 4 according to data published on the website of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

As a large epidemic rips through China’s urban areas in the wake of a sudden relaxation of disease controls last month, WHO officials, who have struggled with China’s strict control of data access throughout the pandemic, are calling for trustworthy information louder and more frequently.

In that country, the outbreak has overrun hospitals and cemeteries, caused a lack of essential medications, and raised concerns about an even darker month ahead since specialists worry it will spread to less developed rural regions over the forthcoming Lunar New Year.

The increase in cases in a nation with 1.4 billion people has also sparked worries abroad about the possible introduction of novel strains as well as China’s amount of data sharing and monitoring.

Many nations have put in place Covid testing regulations for visitors from China due to the lack of information on the strains that are prevalent there.

According to a statement issued by the Swedish EU presidency on Wednesday, the EU “seriously pushed” its member states to impose a rule that passengers arriving from China must have a negative Covid test.

The WHO’s Tedros said Wednesday it was “understandable” that some countries were taking these steps, “with circulation in China so high and comprehensive data not forthcoming.”

In a Tuesday conference held behind closed doors, Chinese health officials provided current genomic information to a WHO advisory group.

The variants found there are well-known and have been spreading in other nations; the China CDC has not yet reported any new variants, the organization said in a statement on Wednesday.

However, the organization and WHO representatives persisted in highlighting the demand for more timely genetic data.

The recent circumstance compounds long-standing difficulties for the UN agency, which came under fire at the beginning of the pandemic for not pressing China hard enough for statistics amid worries Beijing was withholding crucial information.

Beijing has defended its openness on numerous occasions.

“There’s a lot more data that needs to be shared from China and additionally from around the world so that we can track this pandemic as we enter this fourth year,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on Covid, said Wednesday.

“We need more information on sequencing around the country, (and for) those sequences to be shared with publicly available databases like GISAID so that deeper analyses can be done,” she said.

GISAID is a global initiative that provides access to the genomic data of different influenza viruses.

In a larger meeting on Thursday, WHO officials said member states would also be given information regarding the outbreak in China.

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