December 23, 2022, Beijing: As many as 37 million people are contracting COVID-19 in a single day in China, according to leaked information from the country’s top health body and confirmed by multiple news outlets. In the first 20 days of December, 248 million people—accounting for about 18 percent of the population—were likely to have been infected with the disease, officials said during the National Health Commission’s internal meeting on Dec. 21. The figure is exponentially higher than the regime’s official virus tally, and if accurate, would mean that China’s outbreak is the largest in the world.
Nearly three years under the regime’s stringent zero-COVID policy has left the Chinese public with little natural immunity against COVID-19’s highly contagious Omicron variant, which appears to be spinning out of control in the country.
A screenshot of the conference notes circulating on Chinese social media shows that the virus has hit over half of the residents in the country’s capital of Beijing and Sichuan Province in southwestern China. Sichuan is also one of three provinces with over 20 million infections. In comparison, six other provinces and cities, Beijing included, have an infected population of between 10 million to 20 million, the estimates said. Bloomberg and other media outlets confirmed the notes with anonymous officials involved in the discussions.
The minutes cited 12 Omicron subvariants. The three that are most prevalent, it said, are BA.5.2, BF.7, and BM.7. Officials said they haven’t identified variants with “significant change in transmissibility, pathogenicity, and immune evasion.” How the agency arrived at these figures remains unclear, given that the country abandoned mandatory mass virus testing earlier in the month. The numbers nonetheless appear consistent with anecdotal evidence of a spike in infections and deaths nationwide, including among the regime’s elite circle. They also align with analysis by UK researchers projecting 167 and 279 million cases nationwide, which could lead to between 1.3 and 2.1 million deaths. The virus surge has overloaded morgues and hospitals across China.
