Critics believe the massive death toll from last October to December embarrassed the regime, due to lockdowns and zero-COVID policies that clearly failed to contain the virus, and that is the reason for the missing data.
In the past, China would release quarterly data regarding welfare, registration, and services on marriage, divorce, and cremation within three months. The Ministry of Civil Affairs did not explain the reason why the release was late.
While the ministry is not available for the inquiry on the missing data, the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau hotline told The Epoch Times that the data is still under verification.
China affairs commentator Tang Jingyuan believes that Chinese deaths in Q4 last year during a surge of COVID infections were too huge to handle, even for a regime that is accustomed to falsifying data.
He explained that national death data can’t exist independently. It is related to data on various criteria and departments, such as pensions, medical and health care, social security, and subsistence allowances. Fake cremation service data could expose its lies.
In response to the regime concealing the hit from the pandemic, Dr. Jonathan Liu, a professor of Chinese Medicine at Georgian College in Canada, told The Epoch Times “a responsible government will give the real data to the public” as a way to keep the public better informed and prepared.
When the cases surged in December upon the sudden lifting of the draconic zero-COVID measures, the WHO said the strict policy of the last three years had stopped working anyway.
“The explosion of cases in China had started long before any easing of the zero-COVID policy,” he said.
Liu said Chinese officials have continued to keep its populace from getting relevant pandemic information, even though the COVID outbreaks never ceased inside China.
“Unfortunately, a new reality with this virus [is that] we will have repeated infections,” said Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Liu advised the Chinese to learn lessons from the past three years of pandemic and try to get true information by circumventing the Great Firewall. “Don’t just listen to the propaganda of the Chinese officials,” he said.
Tang said that the plague has had a clear target—members of the Chinese Communist Party, and that’s the reason why the regime is too frightened to reveal the true death tolls.
