China will stop releasing comprehensive data on new Covid cases after the dropping of mandatory testing meant the numbers no longer reflected reality.
(Bloomberg) — China will stop releasing comprehensive data on new Covid cases after the dropping of mandatory testing meant the numbers no longer reflected reality.
The country will only report symptomatic cases from now on because it’s hard to gauge the number of those infected without symptoms in the absence of testing, the National Health Commission said in a statement on Wednesday.
China reported just 2,249 new infections nationwide for Tuesday. Hong Kong, with a population that’s almost 200 times smaller, recorded about 15,000 cases on the same day.
After years of meticulously testing and tracking its citizens for the virus, China abruptly abandoned that approach this month with the end of Covid Zero. The lack of testing now means there is no accurate way to gauge the rate of infection in a population that had previously largely avoided exposure to the virus.
There are clear signs the virus is spreading rapidly. Hospitals in major cities have been overwhelmed, and shops across the country have been cleared of medicine.
Officials have sought to reassure residents that China can meet demand for core pandemic supplies. There are sufficient masks, rapid tests and vaccines and the country is also enhancing the production of key Covid items, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said at a briefing on Wednesday.
Read more: China’s New Covid Approach Is to ‘Let It Rip,’ BI Analyst Says
China has surprised many by its dramatic pivot to living with Covid, especially given the nation is entering winter, its elderly vaccination rate is well below other countries, and the health-care system is under-resourced.
The rapid reopening could result in some 5 million people hospitalized and up to 700,000 deaths, according to Sam Fazeli, Bloomberg Intelligence’s chief pharmaceutical analyst.
China’s mindset is “there’s not so much we can do, we’ve done the best we can,” Fazeli said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Tuesday. “We’ve got the blueprint for what the West did and what happened, so let’s just let it rip.”
China divided positive cases into symptomatic and asymptomatic categories during the pandemic, a distinction not made elsewhere in the world that complicated getting an accurate snapshot of the virus situation.
–With assistance from Daniela Wei.
(Updates to add details on supplies in sixth paragraph.)
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