China is under-reporting Covid-19 deaths: WHO chief

Washington, Jan 12: World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday said that the organization's data on the number of deaths from COVID-19 worldwide is lowered due to the under-reporting of cases by China.

"Last week, almost 11,500 deaths were reported to the WHO: about 40 per cent from the Americas, 30 per cent from Europe and 30 per cent from the Western Pacific region. However, this number is almost certainly an underestimate, given the underreporting of COVID-related deaths in China," ANI quoted Ghebreyesus as saying at a briefing.

The WHO chief urged all countries to share true statistics so as to contribute to a more effective fight against the spread of the disease. Last week, Tedros asked China for reliable data on Covid hospitalizations and deaths in the country. Explaining further, WHO executive director for health emergencies Mike Ryan claimed the numbers released by China "under-represent the true impact of the disease" in terms of hospital and ICU admissions, as well as deaths, reported CNN. He highlighted that many countries have seen lags in reporting hospital data, but pointed to China's "narrow" definition of a Covid death as part of the issue.

The country only lists those Covid patients who succumbed to respiratory failure as having died of Covid. In the two weeks prior to January 5, China reported fewer than 20 deaths from local Covid cases, according to figures released on the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.

The Covid-19 cases in China witnessed a sudden surge in December after the Chinese Communist Party relaxed the zero-Covid policy. The scale of the current outbreak has made it difficult for the authorities to track the Covid infections, following the end of the mandatory mass testing as part of the easing of Covid restrictions.

Meanwhile, China hasn't updated its daily Covid reports for three days even as the world is concerned that the unmitigated spread of the virus could seed mutations