WHO Scientists Call on China to Reveal Real COVID Death Numbers

A coffin is loaded from a hearse into a storage container at the Dongjiao crematorium and funeral home, one of several in Beijing that handles COVID-19 cases, in China, on Dec. 18, 2022. Getty Images

Lead scientific advisers for the World Health Organization (WHO) are seeking a “more realistic picture” of the state of COVID-19 in China, following several obfuscations by China’s communist regime.

The WHO invited Chinese scientists to a closed meeting with its technical advisory group on Jan. 3, intending to allow Chinese scientists to present data concerning the variants of COVID-19 currently circulating in China.

The meeting between the WHO and China’s scientists wasn’t open to the public or the press, however, and has been marred by attempts from Beijing to conceal the true scale of the devastation being wrought by COVID-19 in China.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, lifted its so-called zero-COVID policy in December following historic protests that swept the nation. Rather than phase out the measures, however, the regime ended them in toto, and now cases are surging throughout China.

Speaking to the press ahead of the meeting, virologist and WHO committee member Marion Koopmans said the information Chinese authorities had presented on COVID-19 hospitalization rates was “not very credible” and urged the regime to be more honest for the sake of China’s people.

“We want to see a more realistic picture of what is actually going on,” Koopmans said.

“It is in the interests of China itself to come forward with more reliable information.”

CCP Concealing Mass Death, Infection

Nearly three years of the CCP’s zero-COVID lockdowns left the Chinese public with little natural immunity against the disease, which appears to be spiraling out of control in China.

Despite this, the regime reported that the number of Chinese people who died from COVID-19 in December 2022 was just 10. Similarly, the regime reported three new COVID-19 deaths on Jan. 2 and only one new death on Jan. 1.

However, leaked images of papers from a CCP conference revealed that authorities believe as many as 248 million people became infected within the first 20 days of December. The virus has infected more than half of the residents in Beijing and Sichuan province in southwestern China, according to the documents.

A report released by the UK-based health data firm Airfinity in December estimated that about 9,000 people in China die each day from COVID-19, and that number will likely reach 25,000 deaths per day before the end of this month. Cumulative deaths in China since Dec. 1, 2022, have probably reached 161,000, according to the report.

The BMJ, a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, issued an article on Jan. 3 that found that the CCP was completely obfuscating meaningful data about COVID-19 by changing the criteria it uses to count hospitalizations and deaths.

“China has effectively stopped counting covid cases and deaths, abandoning mass testing and adopting new criteria for counting deaths that will exclude most fatalities from being reported,” the article reads.

Despite the onslaught of new cases, the CCP has announced that it will reopen its borders on Jan. 8.

The move prompted an outcry from the international community, and nations around the world are now rushing to put in place testing requirements for all arrivals from China. The United States, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Malaysia, and Qatar are among the nations seeking to place stronger restrictions on arrivals from China.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a Dec. 28 statement that passengers would need to present a negative COVID-19 test result or proof of recovery before boarding a U.S.-bound flight from China.

The CDC stated that the move was meant to “slow the spread of COVID-19 in the United States during the surge in COVID-19 cases in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] given the lack of adequate and transparent epidemiological and viral genomic sequence data being reported from the PRC.”

A spokesperson for the CCP said the testing requirements are “unacceptable” and that the regime would “take countermeasures” against nations that issue travel restrictions on flights originating in China.

Reuters contributed to this report.