China’s National Health Commission has reported that it will not publish daily coronavirus cases starting this Sunday, but did not detail the reasons for this decision.
The agency has specified that it will release information related to the disease for «study and reference», according to a statement quoted by ‘Global Times’.
This decision by the Chinese authorities comes at a time when the country is experiencing an increase in cases after relaxing some restrictions. In this context, some 248 million people in China, 18 percent of the population, have tested positive for coronavirus in the first three weeks of December.
According to minutes of a Wednesday meeting of China’s National Health Commission, circulated on social media, 37 million people were likely to be infected on Tuesday alone. The British newspaper ‘The Financial Times’ and the Bloomberg agency confirmed this information through sources present at that meeting.
Although official statistics only speak of 62,000 infections nationwide in the three weeks of December, according to the British newspaper, estimates prepared by the deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Sun Yang, show that infections are on the rise.
These estimates come on the heels of nearly three years of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing in China, whose government has at times been inflexible in its prevention policies.
It has recently softened some of its measures on the grounds that the cases of the new variant of the omicron virus are less serious. However, this laxity may also be motivated by the dissatisfaction shown by the population with these restrictions.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
