China announces 1st death from COVID-19 in 6 months
BEIJING — China on Sunday announced its first new death from COVID19 in nearly six months as strict new measures are imposed in Beijing and across the country to ward off new outbreaks.
The death of the 87-yearold Beijing man was the first reported by the National Health Commission since May 26, bringing the death toll to 5,227. The previous death was reported in Shanghai, which underwent a major springtime surge in cases.
China on Sunday announced 24,215 new cases detected over the previous 24 hours, the vast majority of them asymptomatic.
While China has an overall vaccination rate of more than 92% having received at least one dose, that number drops among the elderly — particularly those over 80 — where it falls to just 65%. The commission did not give details on the vaccination status of the latest deceased.
That vulnerability is considered one reason why China has mostly kept its borders closed and is sticking with its rigid “zeroCOVID” policy that seeks to wipe out infections through lockdowns, quarantines, case tracing and mass testing, despite the impact on normal life and the economy and rising public anger at the authorities.
China says its approach has paid off with much fewer numbers of cases and deaths.
With a population of 1.4 billion, China has officially reported just 286,197 cases since the virus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. That compares with 98.3 million cases and over 1 million deaths for the U.S., with its population of 331.9 million, since the virus first appeared there in 2020.
China’s figures have come under question based on the ruling Communist Party’s reputation for manipulating statistics, lack of outside scrutiny and a highly subjective criteria for determining cause of death.
Unlike in other countries, the deaths of patients who presented COVID-19 symptoms were often attributed to underlying conditions such as diabetes or heart disease, obscuring the real number of deaths from the virus and almost certainly leading to an undercount.
Critics pointed to this year’s outbreak in Shanghai. The city of over 25 million only reported about 24 coronavirus deaths despite an outbreak that spanned more than two months and infected hundreds of thousands in the world’s third-largest city.
China has also defied advice from the World Health Organization to adopt a more targeted prevention strategy. Beijing has resisted calls to cooperate fully with the investigation into the origin of the virus, rejecting suggestions it may have leaked from a Wuhan lab, seeking to turn such accusations on the U.S. military instead.
The party’s instinct to use total control — even using routine testing information to limit people’s movements — has won out, with only slight concessions made to criticisms aired on highly censored internet forums.
Over 6.6 million people around the world have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University.