![]() ![]() A full picture of the impact is difficult to gauge, but the narrow parameters for attributing deaths to the virus mean the official count – fewer than 10 this week – is at odds with widespread anecdotal reports of fatalities and high traffic at funeral homes.īenjamin Mazer, an assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins University, said the classification would miss “a lot of cases”, especially as people who are vaccinated, including with Chinese shots, are less likely to die of pneumonia. Since the abrupt scaling-back of the stringent zero-Covid regime following unprecedented protests against the restrictions, cases have rocketed in China. “ can’t give the impression that lots of people are dying, so it would be seen as an outcome of the government’s policy change,” he said. Prof Chung Kim-wah, a social scientist formerly of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told the Guardian that the Communist party had often adjusted concepts and definitions to justify its latest policies. Covid-19 excess mortality accounts for both the total number of deaths directly attributed to the virus as well as the indirect impact, such as disruption to essential health services or travel disruptions, the WHO says.īy these criteria, China’s new method of tallying Covid deaths that excludes underlying diseases would make it difficult to compare fatalities with other countries. Respiratory failure directly caused by the new coronavirus infection is rare.”īut the new method is at odds with World Health Organization (WHO) guidance, which says many countries now use “excess mortality” as a more accurate measure of the true impact of the pandemic.Įxcess mortality is defined as the difference in the total number of deaths in a crisis compared with those expected under normal conditions. ![]() He said that compared with the first outbreak of Covid-19 in early 2020, when most patients died of respiratory failure, “the main cause of death from infection with Omicron is the underlying diseases. “Deaths caused by other diseases such as cardiovascular or cerebrovascular diseases and heart attacks are not classified as deaths caused by coronavirus,” Wang said. The infectious disease expert Prof Wang Guiqiang told a State Council news conference on Tuesday that the National Health Commission had recently revised its guidelines to “scientifically and objectively reflect deaths caused by the coronavirus pandemic”, classifying only fatalities caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure in patients who had the virus as Covid deaths.
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