China declares “decisive” win over Covid amid doubts over death toll data

Beijing China has declared a “decisive victory” over Covid-19, describing it as a “miracle” and claiming the lowest fatality rate globally amid lingering doubts over how many actually died from the infection given the virus had infected over 80% of the country’s 1.4 billion population after restrictions were lifted in December.

Declaration of “victory” over the pandemic means China has moved towards the “endemic” or living with the virus, a state media analysis of the announcement said.

“The Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party China (CPC) central committee said at a meeting on Thursday that China has achieved a major and decisive victory in its Covid-19 prevention and control since November, 2022,” the official news agency, Xinhua, reported, quoting from the meeting.

The meeting was chaired by President Xi Jinping and attended by the country’s top leadership.

“China has created a miracle in human history, in which a highly populous nation has successfully pulled through a pandemic,’’ the Xinhua report said.

The ruling CPC had abruptly ended the “zero-Covid” policy in December, doing away with draconian lockdowns, mass tests and contact tracing.

The three-pronged approach kept the spread of Covid-19 mostly at bay in the mainland but the policies had dented the economy, slowing growth and reducing consumption, and left citizens frustrated because of bruising lockdowns.

By 2022, the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant had further made the “zero-Covid” policy untenable.

Large scale and rare protests held in many parts of China against the government’s stringent anti-Covid policies in November were likely an important reason for lifting the restrictions though there was no mention of it in the official statement announcing “victory” over Covid-19.

There was no mention in the statement either about how many people had died from the disease.

According to official statistics, China recorded just over 83,000 Covid-19 deaths between December 8 to February 9.

Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform in January that the possibility of a big Covid-19 rebound in China over the next two or three months was remote as 80% of people have been infected.

In December, as China’s worst Omicron-driven Covid-19 outbreak was raging across the country, the government had narrowed the definition of Covid deaths, saying it will only count deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure as part of its official Covid-19 death toll.

The change in definition added to the skepticism over the official death toll.

Thursday’s statement glossed over the reports of overflowing hospitals in December and the plight of hundreds of millions who were stuck for weeks in relentless lockdowns imposed since 2020.

“…China’s Covid-19 response has made a smooth transition in a relatively short time, with more than 200 million people accessing medical services, nearly 800,000 severe cases receiving proper treatment, and the country’s Covid-19 fatality rate remaining the world’s lowest,” the meeting said.

“After experiencing the infection waves in December and January, the Chinese society is now back to normal and people have walked out of the pandemic status, which is also in line with the public expectation,” an expert close to the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, who preferred not to be named, told the state-run Global Times tabloid.

“It also means that we have started a process where the disease becomes a common respiratory infection disease that won’t trigger extra public attention and people will take it with a sense of normalcy,” the expert said.

“It marks that we have entered the process of (the disease becoming) endemic,” he said.

The meeting called for “…continuous efforts to strengthen the production and supply of medicines and medical materials, and to earnestly resolve shortcomings in capacity, medicine supply, equipment and other areas at the primary level”.