The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday criticized China’s new “too narrow” definition of a death linked to Covid-19, saying Beijing’s figures “do not adequately reflect” the scale of the epidemic, AFP reported.

The WHO has also confirmed its support for Covid testing for travelers from China.

The same view was heard in Brussels on Wednesday night, where EU member states agreed that the 27 countries are “strongly encouraged” to require all travelers from China to provide a prior negative Covid test of less than 48 before departure within hours.

“The current figures released by China underestimate the true impact of the disease in terms of hospitalizations, intensive care unit admissions and especially deaths,” Michael Ryan, WHO’s chief health officer, told a news conference. .

China has faced its worst outbreak of cases – mostly from the Omicron variant of the coronavirus – after abruptly abandoning its so-called “zero Covid” policy in early December.

But the country reports very few deaths linked to Covid-19 after a controversial change in methodology: the statistics now count only people who died directly from respiratory failure linked to Covid.

“This definition is too narrow,” insisted Michael Ryan.

“We continue to call on China to provide faster, more regular and reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more complete real-time sequencing of the virus,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Calling his organization “concerned” about the situation in China, he again emphasized the importance of vaccination.