China says Covid death toll in hospitals is on a downward trend
- The national Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says deaths in hospitals peaked on January 4 and stood at less than a thousand on Monday
- The number of patients being treated in fever clinics is also reported to be on a downward trend
The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday said it recorded 896 deaths on January 23, the second day of Lunar New Year.
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The report provided the daily hospital death count as a bar chart instead of numbers, except for the two days where it provided precise figures.
Earlier this month, the National Health Commission for the first time released a death toll since the abrupt pivot away from the zero-Covid policy in December.
Jiao Yahui, director of the National Health Commission’s medical affairs department, said on January 14 that the current wave of cases had peaked.
“The number of fever clinic visitors is generally on a downward trend after peaking, both in cities and rural areas,” she said.
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About 76 per cent of people in Beijing had contracted Covid-19 as of December 22 and it was expected to reach 92 per cent by January 31, according to the HKU study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine on January 13.
Other big cities in mainland China are likely to mirror the situation in Beijing, according to the researchers. They expect multiple infection peaks, especially given that tens of millions have been travelling over the Spring Festival and after the first peak.
In the latest CDC report, the centre said that the number of infections confirmed by PCR testing peaked at 6.94 million cases on December 22 and then gradually declined, dropping to 15,000 on Monday.
It noted that a day after China dropped mass testing requirements, 150 million tests were conducted on December 9. The number then fell to 7.54 million on January 1 and further to 280,000 on January 23.
Meanwhile, the number of visits to fever clinics reached a peak of nearly 2.9 million on December 23, with more than 1.6 million people admitted to hospitals.
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The numbers then continued to fall, with 63,000 visits to clinics and 248,000 hospitalisations on January 23.
Among hospitalised patients, the number of severe cases increased by nearly 10,000 a day between December 27 and January 3.
The total number of hospitalisations reached a peak of 128,000 on January 5 and continued to drop. Around 36,000 people with critical illness remained in hospitals on January 23.
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It also said that Omicron subvariants BA. 5.2 and BF. 7 are the dominant strains of the current wave and stressed no new variants have been identified.
In the past four months, the country sequenced nearly 19,000 local infections, all of which were caused by the Omicron variant, according to the report.
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On vaccinations, it said 96 per cent of people aged over 60 years have been fully vaccinated, while 92 per cent of them have received a first booster, citing a special survey for the elderly.
