The jump in Covid 19 infections in China, which is spreading from the largest cities to vast rural areas, scares the World Health Organization which said it was "very concerned" by the unprecedented wave of infections.
But Beijing for its part downplays and assures that it has not recorded any deaths due to the virus after changing the counting criteria.
Chinese authorities say they have recorded a total of seven deaths, all in the capital, since it was decided to lift the 'zero-Covid' policy and lift many of the restrictions in place.
Since yesterday, only those directly attributable to respiratory failure caused by the virus have been considered deaths due to Covid.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
during the weekly press conference in Geneva, he asked Beijing for detailed information on the seriousness of the situation.
"To carry out a comprehensive risk assessment, WHO needs more detailed information on the severity of the situation, disease, hospital admissions and intensive care units," she said.
At the same time, possible mutations of the virus are alarming, while perhaps the most distressing signal are the lines of coffins waiting in front of the crematoria, from the north-east to the south-west of the country, where the people in charge of the service have declared that they are jumping through hoops to keep up with the increase in deaths.
Dr Michael Ryan, WHO's head of health emergencies, has long stressed the need for more vaccinations.
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We have been saying for weeks that this highly contagious virus has always been very difficult to stop completely with public health and social measures alone – he recalled -.
We really need to focus on vaccination.” For nearly three years, the Chinese government has used stringent lockdowns, centralized quarantines, mass testing, and stringent contact tracing to curb the spread of the virus. But this strategy was abandoned earlier this month, a following an explosion of protests across the country against the severe restrictions that have disrupted businesses and the daily lives of the Chinese. According to a new study, writes CNN, abandoning this policy could lead to nearly 1 million deaths in China.
