The Chinese province of Zhejiang, one of the country’s most populous regions, recently became the center of attention when mortality data hinting at a high death toll from Covid was allegedly deleted. This data emerged as a result of Beijing’s decision to relax Covid regulations towards the end of last year and was soon taken offline following its publication, creating a stir across Chinese social media platforms.
Deleted Data and Alarming Cremation Statistics
According to a report published by the Financial Times, the statistics released by Zhejiang province indicated a significant increase in the number of cremations in the first quarter of this year. The number jumped 73% from the previous year to 171,000, a stark contrast to the reported 99,000 and 91,000 deaths in the same period in 2022 and 2021, respectively. Yet, just days after its publication, this data was erased from the provincial government website. A review of a cached version of the information by epidemiologists suggests that this could be the latest evidence of a significant undercount in the country’s official Covid death tally.
The Bigger Picture: China’s Covid Data Transparency
Since the onset of the pandemic in late 2019, China’s reported Covid statistics have come under scrutiny from the global community. The World Health Organization (WHO) even accused China of underrepresenting the severity of its coronavirus outbreak and the real number of deaths.
Questionable Death Toll Estimates
China’s official death toll as of February this year was declared to be 83,150, a number that independent researchers have questioned for its credibility. Since then, the government has only released weekly or monthly death tolls that cumulatively raise the overall total to about 83,700.
The Promise of Accurate Data and the Reality
Despite Chinese health officials vowing to study and help the public access accurate death data following the relaxation of Covid rules, no such statistics have been released to date. The country continues to withhold excess death data, including local-level cremation data, which remains the only publicly available statistic for tracking the country’s death toll.
Extrapolating the Actual Toll
The new data from Zhejiang, despite its limitations, offers critical insight into the potential magnitude of underreporting. When extrapolated to the country’s population of 1.4 billion people, it aligns with estimates from experts.
Estimates from Expert Analysis
An analysis by The New York Times published in February estimated that China’s recent Covid wave may have killed between a million and 1.5 million people. This estimation was based on research from four teams of epidemiologists.
• Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, opined that the data could be used for a crude estimate of China’s nationwide death toll.
• Another research team, composed of Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of biology and statistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Zhanwei Du, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, reached a rough estimate of 1.54 million deaths from December through March in mainland China, based on the cremation count.
• Yong Cai, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies mortality in China, arrived at an estimate of 1.5 million deaths for the first quarter of the year, based on the cremation data.
These expert analyses, in conjunction with the alleged deletion of data, raise grave concerns about the transparency and accuracy of China’s official Covid death counts. If the estimates are accurate, it implies that the Covid pandemic may have had a far more devastating impact on China than what has been officially reported.
