“The answer is we don’t really know an awful lot about what’s going on … apart from reports coming out of China,which include huge queues to crematoriums and overwhelmed hospitals,” Esterman,the chair of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of South Australia,said.
China’s National Health Commission recently stopped publishing daily coronavirus deaths and cases data. This sudden halt to the reporting came amid an explosion in infections and as China abandoned its zero-COVID policy,which had put hundreds of millions under lockdown and battered the world’s second-largest economy.
Complicating the problem is the fact that China does not supply data on genomic sequencing,a critical tool able to quickly detect mutations circulating during an outbreak. Chinese researchers suspect up to a quarter of those infected have caught sub-variant BF7,an offshoot of Omicron – a variant detected in Australia in as far back as mid-2021.
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Other countries including the United States,England,France and Australia,participate in the sharing of genomic sequencing data to detect the global emergence of new variants.
University of Sydney Infectious diseases expert Professor Robert Booy said information on coronavirus deaths in China was extremely limited.
“China were reporting fewer than 10 deaths a day recently,which clearly indicates very poor data,” Booy said. “A conservative estimate is that they had 100 million cases in December,but some are estimating hundreds of millions.”