In the most populous country in the world and where Covid-19 emerged, only 4,636 people died from the disease; for comparison, Paraná has accumulated 40,667 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.
Of these 4,636 deaths, 4,632 occurred by April 2020. Since then, only four more deaths have been registered, half of them in full 2021. A little more than 100,000 Chinese have had Covid-19 since the first cases were registered in Wuhan, while Paraná, with a population more than 120 times smaller, already has almost 1.6 million infected.
It seems unbelievable, but these are official data from Covid-19 in China released by the government of the country – naturally, no serious researcher considers that they reflect reality.
In an article published over the weekend on the Forbes magazine website, researcher George Calhoun, from the Stevens Institute of Technology, in the United States, pointed out that the rate of deaths by Covid-19 in China per 100,000 inhabitants is “a statistical impossibility , medical, biological, political and economic”.
Official statistics from the Chinese dictatorship indicate 0.321 deaths from the disease per 100,000 people since the beginning of the pandemic, while in the United States the rate is 248 per 100,000 inhabitants – almost 800 times higher.
Underreporting situations are common at times of epidemics and pandemics, and even in the United States, The Economist has estimated that 30% of deaths from Covid-19 do not enter the statistics. But the Chinese case appears to be a state policy.
Based on the same model, which takes into account factors such as demography and sudden changes in mortality curves (which allow for a better idea of the real number of deaths by Covid-19 in countries where testing is low), the Economist calculated that the The disease’s mortality rate is underestimated at 17,000% in China and the true number of deaths from the coronavirus in the country would be around 1.7 million, more than double that of the United States, the country that accumulates the highest official number of deaths in resulting from Covid-19 (approximately 825 thousand).
China claims that its unbelievable rates during the pandemic are the result of its aggressive policy of Covid zero, which imposes severe lockdowns when there are outbreaks of the disease. The most recent was applied in the city of Xian and is the largest since the one in Wuhan in early 2020: as of December, more than 13 million people have been confined to their homes and there are reports of lack of food and other essential items .
The Chinese dictatorship points out that this policy has meant that 97% of Covid-19 deaths in China are restricted to Hubei, the province of which Wuhan is the capital.
Over the weekend, Li Yang, former Chinese consul general in Rio de Janeiro and currently adviser to the Information Department at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, needled the US government by retweeting a message from a far-left American party that pointed out that 415,000 people died from Covid-19 in the US and just two in China in 2021: “American politicians firmly believe they should be concerned about the alleged human rights problem in China!”
However, an article from 2020, in the journal Nature, already called into question the argument of the effectiveness of the isolation of Wuhan, suggesting that, when the blockade of the city began, on January 23 of that year, the disease was already spreading across the country. , due to the traditional movement that takes place at the time of Chinese New Year.
In China, many people travel in the Chunyun period, which lasts about 40 days – in 2019 alone, there were almost 3 billion individual trips. In 2020, this period lasted from January 10th to February 18th, coinciding with the initial phase of the pandemic.
Covid-19’s first case outside Wuhan was filed on January 17th. By the end of March, more than 90 percent of cities in mainland China had registered cases of the disease, according to Nature, with most municipalities confirming the first records between 23 and 26 January.
Calhoun argued that China is already known for the low reliability of its economic data and that it refuses to collaborate with investigations into the origins of Sars-CoV-2 – thus, the underreporting of deaths by Covid-19, although absurd, is already would be expected.
“It seems clear that around April 2020, Beijing decided to stop reporting most statistics related to Covid. The destruction, alteration or deletion of this vital data is a problem not just for China and its citizens, but for the entire world. This distorts our understanding of Covid and how best to respond to it. It feeds geopolitical anxieties. It entails serious economic consequences that are only just beginning to appear”, lamented the researcher.
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