From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Official Data Hinted at China’s Hidden Covid Toll. Then It Vanished.   
   By Muyi Xiao, Mara Hvistendahl and James Glanz, July 19, 2023, NY Times   
   Official data from China offered a rare, but brief, glimpse of the true toll   
   of Covid, indicating that nearly as many people may have died from the virus   
   in a single province earlier this year as Beijing has said died in the   
   mainland during the entire    
   pandemic.   
      
   The data was deleted from a provincial govt website just days after it was   
   published on Thursday. But epidemiologists who reviewed a cached version of   
   the information said it was the latest indication that the country’s   
   official tally is a vast    
   undercount.   
      
   The number of cremations in the eastern province of Zhejiang rose to 171,000   
   in the first quarter of this year, the website said. That was 72,000 more   
   cremations, a roughly 70 percent increase, than had been reported in the same   
   period last year.   
      
   In February, China said the official death toll in the mainland since the   
   start of the pandemic was 83,150 — a remarkably low number that independent   
   researchers have said is not credible. Since then, the govt has released only   
   weekly or monthly death    
   tolls that, when added up, raise the overall total to about 83,700.   
      
   Covid surged across China late last year, forcing the govt to abandon its   
   strict pandemic restrictions in December. The government’s abrupt policy   
   reversal, however, left hospitals and pharmacies unprepared for the onslaught   
   and likely accelerated the    
   spread of infections and a wave of deaths across the country.   
      
   That surge of Covid infections across China lasted for about two months. The   
   majority of the deaths occurred in January, but many people died in December   
   as well. Epidemiologists estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the population was   
   infected.   
      
   The Zhejiang data offered a window into cremation figures that have been   
   closely guarded by the Chinese government. While the data does not include the   
   cause of death, researchers regularly use excess death statistics to estimate   
   the impact of major    
   deadly events like disasters and pandemics. Everybody who dies in Zhejiang is   
   cremated, officials say.   
      
   Many local and national authorities have withheld regularly published   
   cremation data since that first major Covid wave started late last year. It is   
   unclear why Zhejiang Province published data for the first quarter of this   
   year, but three days after it    
   surfaced, the report was removed.   
      
   Calls on Tuesday to multiple numbers at Zhejiang’s civil affairs bureau went   
   unanswered. The Beijing-based media outlet Caixin reported on the figures   
   Monday, but its article was also quickly taken down.   
      
   An analysis by The New York Times published in February estimated that   
   China’s recent Covid wave may have killed between a million and 1.5 million   
   people, based on research from four teams of epidemiologists.   
      
   The new data from Zhejiang — which is limited to a province of 65.8 million   
   people — when extrapolated to the country’s population of 1.4 billion   
   people, is roughly consistent with that range, experts from two of those teams   
   said.   
      
   Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, said that the   
   data can be used for a crude estimate of China’s nationwide death toll.   
   “I’m not sure the impact would have been exactly the same in every   
   province, but I think it would    
   be useful for a rough extrapolation,” he said. “It’s consistent with the   
   estimates of around 1.5 million.”   
      
   Another team of researchers — Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of biology   
   and statistics at the University of Texas at Austin and Zhanwei Du, an   
   epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong — reached a rough estimate of   
   1.54 million deaths from    
   December through March in mainland China, based on the cremation count.   
      
   Last year, using an entirely different method based on tests of infections,   
   vaccine effectiveness and other factors in China, the same research team   
   estimated a most likely value of 1.55 million deaths for a slightly shorter   
   period within a plausible    
   range of 1.2 million to 1.7 million. The similarity of those figures to the   
   current estimate probably indicates that Covid spread through all provinces in   
   China in a similar way after the zero Covid policy ended, Ms. Meyers said.   
      
   “The fact that you end up with these very similar numbers suggests that   
   things were equally devastating around the country,” Ms. Meyers said.   
      
   Yong Cai, a demographer at UNC Chapel Hill who studies mortality in China,   
   arrived at an estimate of 1.5 million deaths for the first quarter of the   
   year, based on the cremation data, and said that to gauge total mortality   
   during the surge, deaths in    
   December of last year, when cases started to spike, needed to be factored in.   
      
   He said he was surprised by Zhejiang’s cremation number. “It’s higher   
   than I expected.”   
      
   Zhejiang is one of China’s wealthiest provinces, with good health care and   
   an elderly vaccination rate above the national average. Its age distribution   
   population is roughly representative of China on the whole, with 19 percent of   
   the population over    
   60. In December, as Covid spread widely, Zhejiang’s health authorities   
   announced that the province was recording one million infections a day.   
      
   All four epidemiologists and demographers cautioned that there are caveats and   
   uncertainties in extrapolating the cremation data. But without more reliable   
   data from China, academics say they have to rely on imperfect information to   
   estimate the impact    
   of the virus.   
      
   “We don’t have anything better,” Mr. Cai said.   
      
   Other recent clues hint at the impact elsewhere in the country. Data released   
   earlier this year showed a substantial decline in Shanghai’s life   
   expectancy, from 84.1 in 2021 to 83.2 in 2022, for the first time at this   
   scale since 1983. The drop is    
   likely attributable to the December Covid surge combined with a stringent   
   lockdown in the spring of that year, which prevented some residents from   
   accessing medical care, Mr. Cai said.   
      
   “I sincerely hope that the Chinese govt can publish all the data available,   
   make it transparent so people can understand what’s going on,” he said.   
   “They have the data. It’s sitting somewhere.”   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/world/asia/china-covid-data-toll.html   
      
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