China Adjusts Covid Death Definition Amid Doubts Over Data Accuracy

China has revised its criteria for determining a Covid-related death, leading to speculation that the country's official death toll is not accurately reflecting the impact of the pandemic.

At a National Health Commission briefing in Beijing on Tuesday, Wang Guiqiang, a top infectious disease doctor, declared that only those who tested positive for Covid and passed away due to respiratory failure will be counted as official virus deaths. He further stated that those who died from other diseases or events such as a heart attack, even if they had Covid at the time, will not be classified as a virus death.

In the past, any individual who passed away while having Covid-19, regardless of their pre-existing medical condition, was considered an official Covid death. As recently as last week, the National Health Commission of China informed Bloomberg News that this definition was still in effect.

Wang's statement confirms an article from Caixin that the Chinese government had recently altered their guidelines, introducing a more specific definition of the virus shortly after they had ended their Covid Zero initiative, which resulted in a rapid increase of infections.

The number of cases in China has increased quickly, but the amount of deaths has been relatively low, which is different from the experiences of other countries, including Shanghai and Hong Kong. This has caused worries that the officials are attempting to hide the actual amount of fatalities.

China, a large nation, has had fewer than 10 fatalities since the beginning of the month, even though there has been an increasing number of news stories and social media posts that demonstrate crematoriums and funeral homes, particularly in Beijing, are being inundated.

The alteration in the definition was initiated by the mildness of the omicron strain in comparison to the Wuhan strain at the beginning of the pandemic, according to Wang, a doctor at Peking University First Hospital, who spoke at a briefing to address questions about the accuracy of the death toll.

According to Wang, respiratory failure due to Covid is not a common cause of death. Instead, the most frequent cause of death is an existing medical condition. This new definition has been included in documents from the National Health Commission, though no further details were provided.

In comparison to the United States, other countries have a broader definition of what is considered a Covid death. Even though health officials in some countries recognize that the virus may not be the direct cause of death in a person who tested positive, they still include these fatalities in their Covid death count. The virus can lead to other medical issues, such as blood clots, which can then cause heart attacks, and it can also accelerate death from other illnesses.

In the United States, any death that is in any way related to Covid-19 is attributed to the virus. New Zealand takes a different approach, recording any death that occurs within 28 days of a positive test result as a Covid-19 death. The United Kingdom, however, takes a more nuanced approach, determining whether a death is due to Covid-19 or just involves the virus based on the underlying cause. Regardless, both types of fatalities are still recorded as Covid-19 deaths in official statistics.

China's numbers are likely to be incomparable to other nations when it comes to the death toll from the coronavirus, as well as the fatalities it has reported at different points during the pandemic. The Chinese government has reported a total of 5,242 deaths since the start of the outbreak.