Four separate academic studies estimate that the recent wave of COVID infections in China killed between 1 million and 1.5 million people.
The Chinese government has reported just 83,150 COVID-19 deaths in hospitals as of Feb. 9.
- All four research teams said that their estimates were produced without access to reliable data from China.
- They analyzed data from earlier outbreaks to estimate the number of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths after Beijing ended its "Zero Covid" policies in December.
- China's official COVID-19 death toll is "certainly an underreport of all COVID deaths," according to University of North Carolina demographer Yong Cai.
- At least nine cities in China, including Beijing, have stopped publishing quarterly cremation data.
- One of the research teams estimated that 90% of the Chinese population was infected in just over a month.
- A Chinese government epidemiologist last month said that 80% of the Chinese population had been infected.
- University of Hong Kong epidemiologist Ben Cowling said that China's decision to end COVID-19 curbs likely led to the fastest spread of a respiratory pandemic virus in recent history.
