China: The National Health Commission (NHC) of China has announced that the country will no longer publish daily figures for COVID-19 cases and deaths, ending a practice that began in early 2020.
The country’s top health authority stated that “relevant outbreak information” will be published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], a sub-department managed by the NHC.
The NHC did not explain the reason for its decision to stop releasing daily COVID data.
From today, we will no longer publish daily information on the epidemic. The CDC will publish information about the outbreak for reference and research purposes.
the NHC remarked.
The statement did not provide any information how often China’s CDC would publish its COVID reports.
Following Beijing’s withdrawal of its “zero-COVID” policies, the country is dealing with an increase in virus cases, resulting in bare pharmacy shelves and overflowing hospitals and crematoriums.
Recently, Beijing admitted that the scale of the outbreak has become “impossible” to track following the end of compulsory mass testing.
Health officials in China’s Zhejiang province, located just south of Shanghai, shared that they were seeing more than one million new COVID-19 cases a day.
According to the health chief of Qingdao, a 9-million-resident city in the northern Shandong province, the city is seeing around half a million new infections every day.
In the southern manufacturing hub of Dongguan, a city with a population of more than 10 million, health officials stated that they are reporting between 250,000 and 350,000 new cases daily.