A record 37 million cases of Covid were reported in China in one day
According to estimates from the country’s leading health authority, about 37 million Chinese citizens may have been infected with Covid on a single day this week. With an estimated 248 million cases in the first 20 days of December, or about 18% of the population, this puts the country’s outbreak by far the greatest in the world.
According to minutes from an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission (NHC), the infection rate might be substantially higher than the previous daily record of roughly 4 million, established in January 2022, as reported by Bloomberg.
Due to Beijing’s quick removal of Covid Zero controls, extremely contagious omicron strains have since spread throughout the country. According to estimations from the agency, more than half of the people living in the southwest Chinese province of Sichuan and in the nation’s capital of Beijing are affected. How exactly one would go about arriving such an estimate was, however, not entirely evident.
In the minutes, Bloomberg reported, NHC director Ma Xiaowei reiterated the narrower definition used to count Covid fatalities, although no estimate was provided.
Even though the overall infection incidence is decreasing, officials in Beijing have reported an uptick in the number of really severe and serious cases of Covid. Meanwhile, the agency has urged all regions of China to brace themselves for an imminent rise of serious sickness, which is spreading from urban centres to rural areas.
The official figure of merely 3,049 illnesses registered in China on December 20 is a far cry from the 37 million daily cases expected for that day. It’s also far greater than the previous global record for a pandemic by a wide margin. On January 19, 2022, the number of reported cases worldwide reached a record high of 4 million due to an outbreak of omicron infections that began in South Africa.