HONG KONG—The World Health Organization expressed appreciation for China’s sharing of Covid-19 data after Beijing reported around 60,000 Covid-related deaths over the past month, providing the first major accounting of the death toll since the country lifted pandemic restrictions.
In recent weeks, the WHO had urged China to be more forthcoming about the outbreak now sweeping the country. Public-health specialists—including some at the WHO—had criticized China’s reporting for severely underrepresenting the toll of the latest outbreak.
WHO Director-General Dr.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
spoke Saturday with the director of China’s National Health Commission,
Ma Xiaowei,
a conversation during which Chinese officials also provided data on the number of hospitalizations and patients requiring critical care, according to a statement from the WHO.
The WHO said that it was analyzing the information to understand the impact of the wave and that the reported data showed declining case numbers and hospitalizations—in line with the progression of similar Covid-19 waves in other countries. The United Nations agency said it had requested more details, including a more granular breakdown of the data by province over time and further sequence information of the virus to track the Omicron variant’s evolution.
Dr. Tedros also reiterated the need for China’s “deeper cooperation and transparency” to understand the origins of the pandemic, according to the WHO.
Health officials said 90% of the deaths over the past month were of people with underlying conditions.
Photo:
alex plavevski/EPA/Shutterstock
Until the weekend data release, China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention had logged daily Covid deaths in single digits since the start of December.
Leaked minutes from a Dec. 21 meeting of the National Health Commission, verified by The Wall Street Journal, showed that China’s top health officials had urged hospitals to label deaths as Covid-related only if there were no other underlying diseases, a definition unusually narrow by global standards that health authorities had stated publicly as well. The minutes also estimated that almost 250 million people had contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December.
On Saturday, the NHC said there had been 59,938 Covid-related deaths from Dec. 8, the day after Beijing dropped zero-Covid measures, to Jan. 12, based on a tally of medical institutions. Health officials said 90% of the deaths were of people with underlying conditions, including cardiovascular disease and respiratory illness.
In late November, London-based health analytics company Airfinity estimated that the lifting of zero-Covid measures in China could ultimately lead to 1.3 million to 2.1 million deaths. Epidemiologists have said that China could still mitigate the toll, however, if it continues mask mandates, administers more vaccines and increases the availability of antiviral drugs.
Write to Karen Hao at karen.hao@wsj.com
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