Beijing: Chinese government's health authority estimated that around 37 million of their population might have been infected with Covif-19 on a single day in the current week. This is the world's largest outbreak, Bloomberg reported.
The minutes from an internal meeting of China's National Health Commission held on Wednesday confirmed that nearly 18 per cent of the country's population or around 248 million contracted the virus in the initial 20 days of December.
Bloomberg writes that the sudden withdrawal of Covid Zero restrictions caused the heavy spread over a population with low natural immunity.
However, how the health department came up with the statistics is unclear since it shut down its ubiquitous network of PCR testing booths at the start of this month. Also, precise infection rates were difficult to obtain in other countries during the pandemic after laboratory tests were replaced by home testing, and the latter results were not centrally collected.
In China, people are now using rapid antigen tests to detect infections, and it is not mandatory for them to report positive results. The country also stopped publishing the daily number of asymptomatic cases.
Further, the minutes of the meeting mentioned above do not talk about the number of people who died. It cited the new and narrower definition used to count Covid deaths. The head of NHC said that though there will be inevitable deaths due to the spread of the virus, he reiterated that only people who die from Covid-induced pneumonia would be included in the mortality statistics.
The previous record for an all-time high in total positive cases in a single day was 4 million, and that was on January 19, 2022. This was during the initial wave of Omicron. Now, China, which had reported 3,049 cases officially on December 20, but estimated 37 million cases that day, which is several times higher than the previous world record.