One University of Hong Kong model has forecast that there could be up to a million Covid deaths in China over the coming months. That would be a political problem for the Chinese Communist Party, which prides itself (or tries to) on its competence. But it turns out the CCP has a rather elegant solution: stop counting cases, and you won’t see the scale of the deaths either.
Nobody knows for sure how high case numbers in the country are right now. At the beginning of December, the National Health Commission announced that it would no longer count asymptomatic cases. But even if you’re symptomatic, you’re unlikely to be counted in the official numbers these days. Many city testing sites were dismantled at around the same time, and home testing kits are still hard to come by.
So while at least four of my family members in China have been infected in the last few weeks, including my 81-year-old grandmother, they have not been counted in the official numbers.
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