BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) Jan,5– After U.S. President Joe Biden voiced concern and the World Health Organization (WHO) said Beijing was underreporting the number of deaths from the virus, China said it would On Thursday, he defended his response to the raging COVID-19 outbreak.
WHO Emergencies Director Mike Ryan said Wednesday that Chinese officials have underestimated the data on several fronts, in the most critical of the UN health agency’s remarks.
China scrapped strict COVID controls last month after protests against them, abandoning policies that have protected 1.4 billion people from the virus for three years.
The United States is one of more than a dozen countries imposing restrictions on travelers from China, and Lauterbach also announced stricter rules for entering Germany on Thursday.
China has criticized such border controls as inappropriate and unscientific, and the government announced on Thursday that the border with Hong Kong Special Administrative Region would be reopened for the first time in three years. Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways (0293.HK) said Thursday it will more than double flights to cities in mainland China, welcoming quarantine-free travel.
Millions of people are planning to travel across China for the Lunar New Year holidays later this month.
The Chinese government has downplayed the seriousness of the situation in recent days, with the state-run Global Times in an article on Wednesday, citing interviews with doctors, saying COVID had peaked in several cities, including the capital Beijing.
But at a hospital in the Qingpu suburb of Shanghai on Thursday, patients in beds lined the emergency care area and main lobby corridors, most of them elderly, some with oxygen tanks, according to a Reuters eyewitness.
A chalkboard indicated that patients had to wait an average of five hours before being seen. Staff pronounced the elderly patient dead and attached the note “respiratory failure” to the corpse lying on the floor.
Police patrolled the outside of a nearby crematorium, where a stream of wreath-wearing mourners waited to collect the ashes of their loved ones.
China, which has one of the lowest official COVID death tolls in the world, has been routinely accused of being underreported for political reasons.
Last December, the WHO said it had received no data on new COVID hospitalizations from China since Beijing lifted its zero COVID policy.
In its latest weekly report, the WHO said China had reported 218,019 new COVID cases weekly through January. 1, it adds that data gaps may simply be due to authorities struggling to count cases.
Since the pandemic first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, countries have differed in how they count COVID deaths.
Chinese health officials have said only deaths from pneumonia and respiratory failure in patients infected with the virus are classified as deaths from COVID.
But disease experts outside China say their approach misses several other widely recognized types of deadly COVID complications, from blood clots to heart attacks, sepsis and kidney failure. He said he would.
International health experts predict at least 1 million of her COVID-related deaths in China this year, but no urgent action. UK-based health data company Airfinity estimates that about 9,000 people are likely to die from COVID in China each day.
Rising COVID infections are hurting demand in China’s $17 trillion economy, with Thursday’s private sector survey showing service activity fell in December.
