What is happening with the coronavirus in China? – The concern about the evidence it gives and the reaction of Beijing

China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today that in the last 24 hours there was one death due to COVID-19, compared to one in the previous one, with the official death toll of the new pandemic coronavirus in the giant Asian country of 1.41 billion inhabitants to reach 5,247 dead since the end of 2019.

Amid growing skepticism about Beijing’s official figures and announcements of measures from several countries of the world in the last 24 hours due to information and concerns about the explosive increase in cases in China, Chinese state media are talking about “discretionary” treatment of the country’s citizens after the authorities’ decision to end the policy “zero COVID” and to fully open the economy at the beginning of the month.

The US, South Korea, India, Italy, Japan and Taiwan have imposed mandatory tests on travelers from China in the past 24 hours.

The “real intention” of these countries is to “attack the country’s system,” wrote the state-run Global Times tabloidcalling the restrictive measures “baseless” and the treatment afforded to Chinese citizens “discriminatory”.

China has announced that travelers from abroad will no longer need to be quarantined from January 8, but still requires that they undergo a PCR test 48 hours before departure.

Italy yesterday called on the rest of the European Union to follow suit, but France, Germany and Portugal said they saw no need for new restrictions, while Austria highlighted the economic benefit of the return of Chinese tourists. in Europe.

Spending by Chinese visitors to foreign countries exceeded $250 billion a year before the pandemic broke out, as reported by Reuters and relayed by the Athens News Agency.

For their part, the US authorities express their concern about possible mutations of the virus, as it spreads in the country with the largest population in the world, while they do not hide that they consider the official data opaque. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) plans to test sewage samples in aircraft lavatories for new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the agency told Reuters news agency.

The numbers announced by China have nothing to do with the experience in other countries: the US counts over a million dead. In Hong Kong, a city that is part of China, with a population of 7.4 million inhabitants, the number of victims of the pandemic has exceeded 11,000 dead.

According to British medical data company Airfinity, as many as 9,000 people may die in China every day from COVID-19. The number of deaths in China since December 1 is likely to be around 100,000 and infections by the virus around 18.6 million, according to the same img. Airfinity expects that the peak of the current wave of the pandemic in China will be recorded around the middle of January (the 13th), with 3.7 million cases per day.

In mid-December, the US-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimated that deaths in China due to COVID-19 will exceed one million by 2023. According to its calculations, cases will peak around April 1 , when about a third of China’s population will have been infected by the virus.