INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
China&s National Health Commission has announced it will no longer be publishing daily COVID-19 infection figures, as the virus rips through
the population.&As of today, we will no longer be releasing daily statistics on the pandemic, with any data released by the China Centers
for Disease Control and Prevent for the purposes of reference and research,& the health ministry said on its official website.The
announcement came as China said Monday that beginning on Jan
8, 2023 it will put an end to a mandatory quarantine on arrival for overseas travelers that had been in place since March 2020.Officials had
already warned that the development of the current outbreak had become &impossible to track& in the absence of mass testing, Radio Free Asia
reported.According to Bloomberg and other media outlets, Chinese authorities estimated in a closed internal meeting that around 250 million
people in China were infected with COVID-19 this month.Quoting data from the internal meeting of the National Health Commission of China on
Wednesday, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and Mingbo reported that approximately 248 million people in China, or about 18% of the country&s
population of 1.4 billion, were infected with COVID-19 for the first twenty days of this month.The Financial Times reported that Sun Yang,
the deputy director of the National Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention, shared this information.Bloomberg reported, &At the closed
meeting, it was announced that an estimated 37 million people across China were infected just on Tuesday.& The Chinese government officially
announced that 3,049 new cases were confirmed on that day.The announcement came amid anecdotal evidence of skyrocketing death rates and
overwhelming pressure on hospitals
A hospital in Taizhou city recently announced it had passed two million emergency room visits in recent days, while a video clip uploaded to
social media by a Shanghai resident on Sunday showed hundreds of people lining up to get served at the city&s Baoxing Funeral Parlor in
Shanghai, with the line stretching out of the gate and onto the street, RFA reported.&This is what it&s like trying to take a number,& a
person is heard saying on the audio
&You need to come early on Monday to get in line.&An official in China&s political and legal committee system, the ruling Chinese Communist
Party&s law enforcement hierarchy, said the massive pressure on crematoriums in the city had prompted municipal civil affairs bureau
officials to take control of the sector.Nobody is now allowed to transport the remains of their dead relatives to funeral homes, but must
wait for them to be picked up by funeral home staff, the official told RFA on condition of anonymity.The official said the current wave of
infections is driven by government pressure to reboot the economy after months of damage under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping&s
zero-COVID policy, and suggests the government is pursuing &herd immunity.&&They are expressly telling people who have tested positive to go
to work, to spread the infection as fast as possible,& the official said
&It&s like this all over the country now.&In the absence of data, local governments are issuing estimates of case numbers based on computer
modeling, with the eastern city of Qingdao reporting an estimated 500,000 new infections daily in the city.A Qingdao resident who gave only
the nickname John said that was likely an underestimate.&I think it&s far more than 500,000 … it&s moving so fast, it&s like a deluge,& he
&I never expected it to spread so fast.&&There&s a hospital near where I live, with vehicles lined up on the street outside … bringing
people for treatment,& he said
&Our whole family is infected.&Meanwhile, authorities in the eastern province of Zhejiang estimated there were more than one million new
infections across the province daily, with similar shortages of mortuary spaces and cremation slots at funeral homes.Officials announced on
25 that new cases are likely to hit two million a day at the peak, which they expect will be around Jan
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