Beijing: Facing growing scepticism that it is downplaying Covid deaths, the Chinese government defended the accuracy of its official tally by revealing it had updated its method of counting fatalities caused by the virus, reported CNN.
According to the latest guidelines from the National Health Commission, only those whose death is caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting the virus are classified as Covid deaths, said Wang Guiqiang, a top infectious disease doctor. He said those deemed to have died due to another disease or underlying condition, such as in the event of a heart attack, will not be counted as a virus death, even if they were sick with Covid at the time, reported CNN.
Commenting on China’s criteria for counting Covid deaths on Wednesday, the World Health Organization’s emergency chief Michael Ryan said the definition was ‘quite narrow’.
“People who die of Covid die from many different (organ) systems’ failures, given the severity of infection,” Ryan said, adding, “So limiting a diagnosis of death from Covid to someone with a Covid positive test and respiratory failure will very much underestimate the true death toll associated with Covid.”
According to Wang, the Chinese doctor, the change in the definition was necessitated by the mild nature of Omicron, which is different from the Wuhan strain at the start of the pandemic, when most patients died from pneumonia and respiratory failure.
But Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, pointed out that this is more or less the same strict criteria Chinese authorities have used to tally Covid deaths all along, reported CNN.
The definition was only slightly broadened in April this year to include some Covid patients, who died of underlying conditions during the Shanghai lockdown in order to justify the draconian restrictions, Jin said.
During Shanghai’s outbreak from March to May, city officials reported 588 Covid deaths from some 600,000 infections. But once the city’s lockdown lifted, the nationwide death toll remained at zero for the next six months, despite the number of infections reaching into hundreds of thousands.
In late November, Beijing announced three octogenarians had died of underlying conditions with Covid, just as the city ramped up its own Covid restrictions amid a widening outbreak.
According to Jin, these inconsistencies reveal China’s method of counting Covid deaths to be ‘entirely subjective’.
