Rome, April 17 (IANS) China’s Covid-19 death toll has been estimated at between 1.44 million and 2.56 million excess deaths among those over 65 years – figures that align with independent studies and are significantly higher than the official count, a report stated this week.

“For three years, China functioned within a vast health crisis of its own creation. The Zero Covid policy involved mass testing, digital surveillance, quarantines that affected entire apartment blocks, and extensive lockdowns that made the rest of the world’s restrictions seem mild. This approach was presented as a success of discipline and the state’s strength. For a time, it worked. While other countries faced multiple waves of infection, China managed to keep the virus away through strict measures: a cough meant sealing off an entire neighbourhood,” a report in Italy-based online magazine ‘Bitter Winter’ detailed.

“But by late 2022, the plan began to fail. Omicron, a variant that viewed lockdowns as a small hurdle, slipped through the system,” it added.

The report stated that after months of increasingly “bizarre restrictions”, the public frustrations in China errupted into protests not seen since 1989, with demonstrators calling for an end to the lockdowns, with some even “daring to demand” Chinese President Xi Jinping’s resignation.

Within days, the government enacted one of the quickest policy changes in China’s recent public health history, formally ending Zero Covid on December 7, 2022, which Xi framed as his personal victory over the virus.

According to a report, what followed was far from victory; rather, a massive surge in infections overwhelmed the health system in China, with pharmacies running out of fever reducers within hours, hospitals overflowing, and antiviral drugs becoming scarce.

It further highlighted that in the last week of 2022, deaths among elites increased to more than ten times the pre-pandemic baseline. Weekly mortality peaked at 1,030 per cent above normal, falling to 680 per cent the following week, returning to baseline by February 2023.

Although the entire disaster lasted less than five weeks, the impact was significant, with annual mortality rising by 19 per cent in 2022 and 24 per cent in 2023.

The report further said, “The tragedy is not that China reopened. It did so abruptly, as if flipping a switch, expecting a virus that had been held at bay for three years to wait while the system caught up. Xi Jinping declared victory, but the obituary pages told a different story—not in slogans, but in names, dates, and the quiet realities of loss.”

–IANS

scor/as