China could see more than 1 million COVID-19 deaths in 2023, a report released by the US Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) suggests.
According to IHME, the COVID-19 virus would peak in early April 2023, taking the death toll in China to 322,000, Reuters quoted the IHME director as saying Christopher Murray as said.
China has reported 5,235 virus-related deaths since the pandemic began Data published by Our World in Data. The last official deaths were reported on December 3, 2022.
China’s zero-Covid policy may have been effective in keeping previous virus variants in check. Still, the high portability of the Omicron variants made maintenance impossible, Murray said.
Last month saw Shanghai and Beijing unprecedented protests against China’s “zero-COVID” policy. As a result, lockdowns, mass testing and restrictions have been imposed in cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Tianjin.
It’s been almost three years since China started enforcing some of the regulations toughest COVID restrictions in the world.
“China has reported hardly any deaths since the original Wuhan outbreak. So we looked to Hong Kong to get an idea of the death rate from infections,” Murray added.
Reuters also cited a University of Hong Kong report in which disease modelers predicted that lifting Covid restrictions and allowing all provinces to reopen at the same time would result in 684 deaths per million people from December 2022 to January 2023.
According to figures from China’s 1.41 billion people, that’s 964,400 deaths.
In another study published by Fudan University’s School of Public Health in Shanghai, researchers predicted that an unconstrained omicron wave would result in 1.55 million deaths within six months.
Peak demand for ICUs could be 15.6 times greater than existing capacity if…
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