New research has found that China’s decision to end its strict zero-covid strategy policy has had truly devastating results, with a new report claiming there have been 1.9 million excess deaths in just two months.
The figure only applies to adults over the age of 30 who died between December 2022 and January 2023, according to the paper published in the journal. JAMA Open Network.
The Chinese government previously disclosed about 60,000 COVID-related deaths in health facilities from early December to mid-January.
The researchers’ estimates are consistent with predictions from academic researchers and other health groups.
“Despite being the first place to be hit by COVID-19, China was able to quickly suppress the disease through strict measures over a prolonged period,” said Dr. Joseph Unger, senior author of the paper and a biostatistics and health services researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.
“Because the Chinese population is largely protected from infection by limited natural immunity and is not fully or well vaccinated, the sudden introduction of widespread COVID-19 infection has devastating consequences.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping.EyePress News/Shutterstock
In the US, which reported the highest number of COVID deaths during the pandemic, a cumulative 1.1 million adults aged 45 and over died from the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Estimating the number of deaths from COVID is difficult worldwide for a variety of reasons including the challenge of diagnosing the infection early in the outbreak and tracking everyone affected during the large wave that follows.
Experts agree that the numbers are almost certainly an underestimate in each country and it may take years to calculate the true number.
The excess death toll estimate, another way of calculating deaths that compares death rates among the same group over different time periods, puts India at the top with 6.2 million deaths, followed by China at 1.9 million, Russia at 1.5 million and the US at 1.3 million.
“Excess mortality measures reflect the direct and indirect effects of COVID on the population,” said Dr Unger. “This is important because the true death burden of Covid is routinely underestimated by only counting deaths known to be caused by Covid itself.”
“Our novel strategy for estimating excess mortality is timely and important,” the researchers said. “It shows how a strategic combination of data sources can provide insights into seemingly opaque public health research questions.”
Bomb report
The discovery comes as “patient zero” of COVID-19 was revealed to be a Wuhan scientist who conducted experiments on a souped-up coronavirus.
According to the report, the scientist, Ben Hu, was conducting a risky experiment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with his two colleagues, Ping Yu and Yan Zhu.
Workers in PPE unload groceries from a truck before distributing them to locals under a COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai, China.AP
It is understood that all three fell ill with COVID-like symptoms and required hospital care weeks before China revealed the virus outbreak to the world.
Several US government officials identified the three scientists in a bombshell report by reporters Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi.
Writing in the Substack newsletter Public earlier this year, they claimed the scientists were experimenting with the coronavirus when they fell ill in 2019.
Many experts and intelligence officials have long suspected scientists in the lab accidentally spread COVID-19 during so-called “gain of function” experiments on bat coronaviruses.
The designation of “patient zero” could be the so-called smoking gun – adding to the evidence of the laboratory’s leaky state.
It’s unclear who in the US government has intelligence about sick lab workers, how long they’ve had it, and why it hasn’t been shared with the public.
Sky News presenter Sharri Markson, who spoke to him Sun on the lab leak theory in 2021, saying it marks “explosive development”.
Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing, described it as a possible “game changer”.
“It is a game changer if it can be proven that Hu fell ill with Covid before anyone else,” he said.
“That would be the ‘smoking gun’. Hu is the direct lead researcher in the lab (virologist Shi Zhengli).
DRASTIC – an international team of scientists and investigators trying to fill in the gaps of the origins of Covid-19 – researched the three scientists in 2021.
– with The Sun’s Imogen Braddick
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
