Zhejiang, China’s large industrialized province near Shanghai, is dealing with about 1 million new cases of COVID-19 every day, and its officials expect the number of infections to double in the coming days, the provincial government said on Sunday, according to Agerpres.

Despite a record rise in the number of COVID-19 cases across the country, China has not reported any deaths related to the disease on the mainland in the past five days, the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Sunday. .

Chinese citizens and health experts are calling for more accurate medical data as infections have soared since Beijing’s central government overhauled the “Zero COVID” policy, a national strategy that has put hundreds of millions of residents under merciless quarantine and which seriously affected the second economy of the world.

National health data in China became incomplete after the National Health Commission stopped reporting asymptomatic infections, making monitoring cases much more difficult. On Sunday, the same commission announced it would no longer report the daily numbers of infections and deaths that the CDC would publish.

Zhejiang is one of the regions in China that has reported a recent increase in infections, including asymptomatic cases.

“We estimate that the peak of infection will come to Zhejiang earlier and will enter the period of high cases around the New Year, when the number of new infections will be between 1 and 2 million every day,” the Zhejiang government announced.

Authorities in Zhejiang province, which has a population of 65.4 million, said that of 13,583 patients treated in local hospitals, only one patient had serious symptoms caused by COVID-19, and 242 infections that caused severe or critical conditions , existing diseases were caused.

China has narrowed its reporting definition of deaths related to COVID-19 to include only those caused by pneumonia or respiratory failure due to COVID-19, to the dismay of international health experts.

The World Health Organization (WHO) did not receive new data from China on the number of new hospitalizations after Beijing eased anti-epidemic restrictions. The WHO believes that this pause in data transmission may be caused by the fact that health authorities are facing difficulties in counting the number of cases in the country with the largest population in the world.

“The most dangerous weeks”

“China is entering the most dangerous weeks of the pandemic. Authorities are currently making little effort to slow the spread of infections, and with migration set to begin before Chinese New Year, any part of the country is not yet in the grip of a wave of COVID-19. -19 will soon experience something similar”, – states the analytical company Capital Economics.

According to recent estimates, the cities of Qingdao and Dongguan are infected in the tens of thousands every day, far exceeding the national daily balance of asymptomatic cases.

According to Chinese state media, the country’s health care system is under great strain, with health workers being asked to work even when they are sick, and retired health workers from rural communities being rehired to help with ongoing medical efforts.

The urgency will increase as the Lunar New Year approaches in January, when huge numbers of Chinese will return to their homes.

Over the past week, the number of visits to clinics treating viral diseases in Zhejiang has reached 408,400 per day, 14 times the normal level, a provincial official said at a press conference.

Daily consultation requests at emergency centers in the provincial capital of Hangzhou have more than tripled on average from last year, Chinese state television reported on Sunday, citing a Hangzhou health official.

On Saturday night, the eastern province’s city of Suzhou reported a record 7,233 calls to its emergency medical helpline on Thursday.