China's narrow criteria for identifying deaths caused by COVID will underestimate the true toll of the pandemic's current wave there and could make it harder to communicate the best ways for people to protect themselves, foreign health experts warn
Only deaths caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting COVID will be classified as having been caused by the coronavirus, a leading Chinese medical expertDeaths from complications at other sites in the body, including underlying conditions made worse by the virus, would be excluded from the official toll, said Wang Guiqiang, head of the infectious disease department at Peking University First Hospital.
The methods for counting COVID deaths have varied across countries in the nearly three years since the pandemic began. The new definition "clearly won't capture all deaths from COVID," said Dr. Aaron Glatt, an infectious diseases expert at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital in New York and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. "To say you're going to ignore anything else going on in the body makes no sense and is scientifically inaccurate."
Globally, the study estimated 18.2 million excess deaths in 2021-2022, compared with reported COVID deaths of 5.94 million. Even if China were to continue defining COVID deaths more broadly, the official data is still unlikely to reflect the situation on the ground, given how quickly infections are now spreading, said Chen Jiming, a medical researcher at China's Foshan University.
"The persistent critical issue is a lack of transparency; people cannot use their data to do research and analysis, provide guidance for the next step," he told Reuters.
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