The Financial Times published the information. This amount reflects 18% of the Asian country's population.
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| Beijing, the capital city of China |
According to statistics obtained by the Financial Times, the Chinese health authorities believe that over 250 million individuals, or 18% of the population, were infected with coronavirus in the first 20 days of December, when the Beijing administration began to relax its zero COVID policy.
According to estimates, 37 million people tested positive for COVID as recently as Tuesday. 2.6% of the population is represented by this figure. The Financial Times said that Sun Yang, deputy head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, shared the information at a health briefing on Wednesday, according to two British media sources.
Sun said the rate of contagion in the country was still rising and estimated that more than half the population of Beijing and Sichuan was already infected , the Financial Times sources said .
The outbreak in China comes after the regime decided this month to abandon its zero COVID policy , which included mass testing, mandatory quarantines and strict lockdowns.
The Sun findings contrast with the National Health Commission's data, which showed just 62,592 symptomatic instances of COVID in the first 20 days of December. According to the Financial Times, China ceased trying to publicly record the overall number of illnesses last week when officials halted COVID testing.
For its part, the US wants the surge in COVID-19 cases in China to be "handled," recognizing that it raises worries about the prospect of a new coronavirus type arising.
On Monday, China announced its first COVID-19-related fatalities in weeks, raising concerns about whether the official number reflects all of the victims of an illness that has swept cities since the government eased its zero-COVID policy.
"Given the magnitude of China's GDP and economy, the number of viral casualties is reason for worry for the rest of the globe," said State Department spokesman Ned Price. "It's beneficial not just for China to be stronger against COVID, but it's also good for the rest of the globe."
"We know that every time the virus spreads, it has the ability to evolve and represent a threat to individuals throughout the world. We've seen it over the course of many different permutations of this virus, and it's certainly another reason why we're so focused on assisting countries all over the world in dealing with COVID, and another reason why ending this in China would be beneficial," the official said at a press conference.
For his part, infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci warned that "whenever there is a significant wave of transmissions of a virus, it is given adequate chance to mutate ", which "allows possibly new versions to be generated " and "to have an influence on the rest of the globe.
"We continue to implore China to perform the needed research," stated the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus , in the penultimate news conference of 2022, while emphasizing that the silence of Beijing "compromises our capacity to prepare for future pandemics" .
Tedros, on the other hand, stated that no idea has been ruled out and that all possibilities on the genesis of the coronavirus "remain on the table."