The confirmation of the first deaths in Shanghai amid the current Covid outbreak, which paralyzes China’s financial hub, reignited suspicion about the quality of data on the pandemic in the country, which officially only confirms 4,641 victims of the disease since the discovery of the virus. , at the end of 2019.
This Monday (18, still Sunday night in Brazil), the city administration confirmed that three people died of Covid, two women aged 89 and 91 and a man aged 91. According to the regime, the three had comorbidities such as heart problems, diabetes and high blood pressure.
“The condition of the three people worsened after they were admitted to the hospital. They died after efforts to save them proved ineffective,” the city said.
Shanghai is undergoing a strict lockdown, with a ban on going out to the streets for most residents, mandatory quarantine in confinement centers for infected people and episodes of food shortages, which has provoked protests and dissatisfaction in the population.
The information that these would be the first deaths in the city in months contradicts journalistic investigations that have pointed to a series of victims since the omicron variant broke through the country’s rigid barriers.
A report by Caixin, a respected Chinese vehicle, published on April 3, investigated the situation of elderly people in nursing homes and found at least 11 people who had died of the disease. Journalists also reported hearing from family members of 12 other dead people who were allegedly infected. The report, however, was taken off the air shortly after the complaint, and the regime did not recognize the victims in the official count.
Days earlier, on March 31, the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal had reported that “many patients had died” at an elderly hospital in the city, with testimonies from family members of victims and testimony from staff who saw “the removal of a number of bodies” of the place. Other Western outlets, such as Britain’s BBC, also cited deaths – in a report on Saturday, the broadcaster mentioned 27 deaths in just one hospital.
None of these deaths, however, entered the official count of victims of the disease in the city, and the local government never commented on the investigations.
There are few questions about the success of China’s control of the pandemic. In the world’s most populous country, most of the population has led near-normal lives for the past two years as the western world has closed schools and businesses.
But the very low number of official deaths, despite what independent investigations show, combined with difficulties imposed by the Chinese regime on foreign missions that went to the country to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, increased suspicions about confidence in the country’s official data.
This year, counting the three deaths recorded in Shanghai on Sunday, China officially counts only five victims of Covid-19: on March 19, another two deaths were confirmed in the province of Jilin, in the northeast of the country, on the border with China. North Korea and Russia.
For professor of international relations Mauricio Santoro, from Uerj (University of the State of Rio de Janeiro), “it is very difficult to believe that among the hundreds of thousands of cases in Shanghai, a city with 26 million inhabitants, there were only three deaths”.
He claims that the lockdown ended up becoming a political issue after protests by residents, which had not been seen in previous restrictions. “And now the government is just not prepared to admit the real number of victims,” ​​he says.
For comparison purposes, Hong Kong, which has 7.5 million people and faced a serious outbreak of Covid with the advance of the omicron this year, recorded about 9,000 deaths from the disease in 2022. The numbers from the Special Administrative Region do not enter into the China’s official count, which has its own policies to deal with the disease.
Experts say that this difference is due to the way deaths are classified: in Hong Kong, anyone who has contracted Covid up to 28 days before dying is considered a victim of the disease.
“They are completely different methods. More than 90% of deaths reported in Hong Kong would not be counted in mainland China,” Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, told CNN. “In mainland China, if the victim has comorbidities, most deaths are categorized as having causes other than Covid.”
The Hong Kong outbreak was especially more serious due to the low vaccination rate among the elderly, a problem similar to that recorded in Shanghai, which has about 4.3 million residents over the age of 60.
To lessen the impact of the strict rules on the country’s economy, China in the middle of last year adopted what it calls a “dynamic zero Covid policy”, which proposes to close neighborhoods or regions before imposing a lockdown on an entire city – which happened. with Shanghai throughout February and March.
However, the fact of keeping the policy restricted while almost the entire planet has already reopened its borders is what has provoked the revolt of residents. The regime’s fear is that China will go through a movement similar to that of South Korea, which successfully controlled the pandemic until December, but came to record days with more than 600,000 contaminations in March, amid the advance of the omicron.
