China has denied under-reporting Covid-19 deaths and said an evaluation of the true scale of its wave of infections is under way. Liang Wannian , leader of the National Health Commission’s Covid-19 expert response team, said it was difficult to accurately calculate the fatality rate during a massive outbreak, with treatment and prevention the current priority. “It is only after the wave when we can calculate the case fatality rate and death rate more accurately,” Liang told reporters at a briefing on Thursday. The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) reported 14 deaths from Covid-19 from December 1-29 on Friday, bringing the national death toll from the virus to 5,247 since the start of the pandemic. The numbers are in stark contrast to social media accounts of overwhelmed morgues and long queues at crematoriums since earlier this month when China abandoned its zero-Covid policy . Medical services are straining to cope and resources like drugs and devices are scarce. An unverified document, purportedly leaked from the National Health Commission (NHC) and circulated on Chinese social media, estimated that more than 248 million people were infected in the first 20 days of December. The NHC stopped reporting daily Covid-19 infections on December 25, saying that in future the China CDC would publish relevant pandemic information for reference and research. From January 8 – when the country downgrades Covid-19 management from its top infectious diseases category – only severe cases and death numbers will be reported by the China CDC, with the frequency eventually reduced to once a month. Jiao Yahui, director of the NHC’s medical affairs department, clarified earlier reports that China had also narrowed its definition for the official Covid-19 death toll, counting only patients who die from respiratory failure caused by the virus. Jiao said this had always been China’s approach, but said that if the deceased had shown a clear positive PCR test, the case would be included in the Covid-19 death tally. Other cases would be counted under the China CDC’s system of recording causes of death. “The reported Covid-19 deaths include both deaths caused by Covid-19 and by underlying diseases,” she told the same media briefing. Also present was Wu Zunyou, a top adviser at the China CDC, who said the centre had started analysing excess mortality rates – the difference between the expected number of deaths over a period under normal conditions and actual fatalities. “The team has started relevant work, and will release the results gradually,” he said. British-based health data firm Airfinity has forecast 9,000 daily deaths, peaking at 25,000 a day on January 8. Its study, released on Thursday, used data from China’s provinces combined with the growth rates in cases reported by other places as they lifted restrictions, such as Hong Kong and Japan. Airfinity estimated that China’s total death toll from the start of the surge in December to January 8 would reach 584,000, and climb to 1.7 million across the country by the end of April 2023. The study also suggested that cases in Beijing are likely to have peaked, while hospitalisations and deaths are likely to peak in the next one to two weeks.