China censors report on this city seeing half a million Covid cases a day
A Chinese health official claimed that half a million people in the eastern city of Qingdao city are being infected with Covid every day, a rare admission of the Coronavirus scare.
That has spread across the world. The numbers are in stark contrast to the official figures as China reported zero deaths and few hundred cases for the fourth consecutive day.
A news outlet operated by the ruling Communist Party in Qingdao reported the municipal health chief as saying that the eastern city was seeing “between 490,000 and 530,000” new Covid cases a day, Associated Press reported.
The coastal city of around 10 million people was “in a period of rapid transmission ahead of an approaching peak”, health official Bo Tao said, adding that the infection rate would accelerate by another 10 per cent over the weekend. The report was shared by several other news outlets but appeared to have been edited by Saturday morning to remove the case figures.
In Shandong, the province where Qingdao is located, authorities officially logged just 31 new domestic cases, indicating that official figures have become an unreliable source of Covid data since China has abandoned mass testing as it scrapped zero-Covid policy.
This month, China has rapidly dismantled key pillars of its zero-Covid strategy, doing away with snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and travel curbs in a swift u-turn of its hallmark containment strategy.
Cities across the country have struggled to cope as surging infections have emptied pharmacy shelves, filled hospital wards and appeared to cause backlogs at crematoriums and funeral homes.
But the end of strict testing mandates has made caseloads virtually impossible to track, while authorities have narrowed the medical definition of a Covid death in a move experts have said will suppress the number of fatalities attributable to the virus.
China’s government under President Xi Jinping keeps a tight leash on the country’s media, with legions of online censors on hand to scrub out content deemed politically sensitive.