3 Data from China offers more questions than answers

So, what then explains such a major deviation in deaths? Is it the near-continuous lockdown, was there a significant jump in vaccination, is the strain of virus behind this wave milder, or is there something more than meets the eye?

First, let’s look at curbs. As chart 2 shows above, China currently stands at 62.5 on the Oxford stringency index. During the April surge, when deaths hit an all-time high, the stringency index stood at 79.2 — meaning that deaths being low right now has little to do with curbs. Now, vaccination. China has gone from 230 doses per million in early April to around 240 in November. A marginal increase (4.3%) is unlikely to have caused a plunge in deaths.

A deeper dive into the official death numbers raises more questions than answers. Three deaths in a country the size of China during a week that has seen the most infections ever is suspiciously low, especially considering the opaque nature of data from the country.

Let’s look at case fatality rate (CFR). First some context: India’s CFR in 2022 has been around 0.5% thanks to the much milder Omicron surge. In the United States, this number has been 0.6%, and it is 0.3% in Britain.

During the April surge, at the peak rate of deaths, China’s CFR was around 0.2% . And the current numbers from China are lower still — the CFR of deaths in the past week calculated from cases reported two weeks prior to that is 0.004%. Even if the country was seeing the rather optimistic

CFR of 0.2% it would be reporting at least 22 deaths a day (compared to around 0.4 deaths a day being reported) right now.

Covid-19 Stringency Index in six countries In the absence of access to clear data, any deep analysis from China will remain a matter of speculation. But on the face of it, China’s “Zero-covid” approach appears far more heavy-handed than required (as every other country has returned to normalcy despite case surges) unless things are worse than official data shows. After all, the low efficacy of China’s Covid vaccines is now a matter of scientific record, and a succession of reports have pointed to the fact that there has been remarkable reluctance to be vaccinated among people over the age of 80 in the country. It will be interesting to see whether the protests force Beijing to relax its policy or it sticks to its opaque approach.

Vaccine doses administered