Almost 250 million people in China may have caught COVID-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate from the nation's top health officials, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times. 9News
The estimates follow China's decision at the start of December to abruptly dismantle its strict zero-COVID policy which had been in place for almost three years.
How the NHC came up with the estimates cited by Bloomberg and the Financial Times is unclear, as China is no longer officially tallying its total number of infections, after authorities shut down their nationwide network of PCR testing booths and said they would stop gathering data on asymptomatic cases.
Officially, China has reported only eight COVID deaths this month - a strikingly low figure given the rapid spread of the virus and the relatively low vaccine booster rates among the elderly. Facing growing skepticism that it is downplaying COVID deaths, the Chinese government defended the accuracy of its official tally by revealing it had updated its method of counting fatalities caused by the virus.
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