China's lifting of Covid curbs led to around two million excess deaths: Study

China's sudden lifting of the strict COVID-19 regime, which led to the spread of the virus among its 1.4 billion residents, is likely to have resulted in nearly 2 million excess deaths in the next two months, as per a new US study.

The study, which was carried out by the federally funded Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre in Seattle, was donefrom a sample of mortality data that appeared in some internet searches and was published by a few universities in China.

The study found that around 1.87 million excess deaths were related to health issues that were faced by people above the age of 30 years between December 2022 and January 2023, and were observed in many provinces in mainland China except Tibet.

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The decision of China last December to suddenly lift the three-year zero-Covid policy, which included persistent and stringent quarantine lockdowns and mass-testing, resulted in a massive increase in deaths and hospitalisations which health experts said went largely unreported by the government.

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The study, which was published in JAMA Network Open on Thursday, stated that the number of excess deaths went far beyond the estimates of the official Chinese government in January that put the death toll at 60,000 in hospitals after they abandoned the zero-COVID policy a month earlier.

No response from China's National Health Commission

Statistical analysis was performed by the researchers with the use of information from published obituaries and data collected from searches on Baidu, a Chinese internet search engine.

"Our study of excess deaths related to the lifting of the zero-COVID policy in China sets an empirically derived benchmark estimate. These findings are important for understanding how the sudden propagation of COVID-19 across a population may impact population mortality," wrote researchers.

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The National Health Commission of China failed to immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. China was repeatedly called on by global health experts to reveal more data as reports of increasing deaths and hospitalisation started to surface, especially as concerns increased around the threat of new variants.

Virus continues to lurk in China

The virus is still making rounds in China, and Beijing health officials on Thursday (August 24) said that COVIDis still the biggest infectious disease in the capital, as per the Chinese state media.

Officials stated that a new Omicron variant, called EG.5, which has been nicknamed "Eris", after the Greek Goddess of strife and discord, has been a dominant strain across the country.

"The National Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention said the proportion of the new variant EG.5 increased from 0.6% in April to 71.6% in August, becoming the dominant strain in most provinces in China," reported the Global Times.

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