China’s Top Health Agency Stops Publishing Daily COVID Data After Leaked Memo Shows Hundreds of Millions of Cases

People receive medical attention in a Fever Clinic area in a Hospital in the Changning district in Shanghai on Dec. 23, 2022. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

China’s National Health Commission (NHC) will no longer publish daily COVID-19 cases or death numbers after leaked data showed hundreds of millions of people nationwide were thought to have contracted the virus in December.

“From today, we will no longer publish daily information on the epidemic,” the health commission said in a brief Sunday statement, after having released daily COVID-19 updates over the past three years since the early outbreak in 2020.

“Relevant COVID information will be published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention for reference and research,” the NHC added, without giving any reasons why it will no longer provide the information.

The NHC also gave no details on how the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention would report on COVID-19 cases.

The central authorities halted its strict “zero-COVID” restrictions earlier this month. Home quarantining is now permitted, mass PCR testing has been dropped, and residents and travelers are now exempt from health QR code checks. People are now undertaking rapid antigen tests themselves to detect infections with no need to report positive results.

Since its u-turn on policy, the national authorities have not provided clear data on the spread of the virus across the country.

Leaked Minutes

The abrupt exit from years of relentless lockdowns has resulted in a dramatic surge of cases in China, with nearly 37 million people estimated to have contracted COVID-19 in a single day, according to leaked minutes from an NHC meeting held on Dec. 21, first reported by Bloomberg.

The same meeting notes said that as many as 248 million people had probably contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December, the report said.

People queue to be tested for COVID-19 outside a hospital in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, on Dec. 16, 2022. STR/AFP via Getty Images

National data has become ambiguous since the policy shift.

The World Health Organization has received no data from China on new COVID-related hospitalizations since Beijing eased its restrictions. WHO said the data gap might be due to the authorities struggling to tally cases in the world’s most populous country.

On its last day of giving figures, there were some stark contrasts between NHC figures and those from more local sources.

The local health commission in Zhejiang, a province with a 65 million population, told a news conference on Sunday that the number of recent infections there exceeded one million per day while counting that the daily number could peak at 2 million daily in the run-up to New Year’s Day,  including asymptomatic cases.

Without reporting asymptomatic infections, the NHC figures announced only 30 new confirmed cases for Zhejiang per day, it said on Sunday.

Qingdao, a city of 9 million people in the eastern Shandong Province, is experiencing 490,000 to 530,000 infections per day based on data projections, Chinese media reported on Saturday, citing a local government health official. The NHC tally released on Sunday was less than 40 new cases per day across the whole province, with the exception of asymptomatic cases.

China has also narrowed its definition for reporting COVID-19 deaths, counting only those who had COVID-caused pneumonia or respiratory failure.

Luo Ya and Reuters contributed to this report.