Chinese health official says half a million people in Qingdao infected with Covid daily; censored
China covid
Almost half a million people in the Chinese city of Qingdao are being infected by Covid-19 every day, said a senior health official.Bo Tao, the municipal health chief reportedly said that the Chinese coastal city with a population of around 10 million people was seeing "between 490,000 and 530,000" new Covid cases a day and that it was "in a period of rapid transmission ahead of an approaching peak". He also said that the infection rate would accelerate by another 10 per cent over the weekend.
This rare acknowledgement of the nation's wave of infections was quickly censored.
Watch |China: Covid-19 cases explode; Beijing underplaying health emergency
As per AFP, Tao's statement was published by a ruling Communist party-backed news outlet and shared by many others, however, by Saturday morning, the reports seemed to have been edited to remove the case figures.
In contrast, figures by China's National Health Commission show a much smaller figure of 4,103 daily cases reported for all of China.
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Official figures for Shandong, the province where Qingdao is located, logged just 31 new domestic cases.
Censorship isn't a new phenomenon in China. The Chinese government maintains strict control over the nation's media, with hordes of online censors on hand to remove anything deemed to be politically sensitive.
In recent days Chinese government-run publications have downplayed the severity of the nation's Covid outbreak, while foreign publications have raised alarm.
(With inputs from agencies)
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