China’s National Health Commission announced on Sunday that it will no longer publish daily data on cases and deaths from COVID-19, as it has done since early 2020.

The decision was announced without any further explanation, but the statistics no longer reflected the unprecedented wave of infections that hit China after abandoning the strict measures of the “zero Covid” policy on December 7, AFP noted.

Previously, quasi-mandatory PCR tests allowed monitoring the trend of the epidemic. But currently, infected people self-test at home and rarely report results to authorities, preventing them from having accurate numbers.

“From now on, we will no longer publish daily information about the epidemic,” the National Health Service announced.

“The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will release information related to the epidemic for reference and research purposes,” the source said, without specifying the type or frequency of data release.

Under the new methodology, only people who died directly from respiratory failure related to COVID are now considered to have died from COVID.

China has reported only six deaths since restrictions were lifted.

Half a million people are infected every day in Qingdao (east), a city of 10 million, estimated a municipal official quoted by state media this week.