Three elderly people between the ages of 89 and 91 died of Covid on Sunday after their condition worsened in hospital, the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission said in a statement Monday.
All three were unvaccinated and had major health conditions such as coronary heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, officials said.
The city reported 2,417 symptomatic cases and 19,831 asymptomatic infections on Monday, slightly less than the previous day, according to the health commission.
The death toll looks staggeringly small compared to the huge number of cases – more than 370,000 people in Shanghai have been infected since March 1, and according to official figures, no one has died from Covid until Sunday.
By comparison, the other financial center in the Hong Kong region has registered nearly 9,000 Covid deaths out of a total of 1.18 million cases as of January this year. Experts attribute the high number of deaths in Hong Kong to the high proportion of unvaccinated elderly people. At the beginning of March, only 48% of people aged 70 and over had received two doses. And earlier this year, only 25% of residents over the age of 80 were vaccinated.
The low official death rate in Shanghai has raised questions among some experts outside mainland China, especially given that the coverage of vaccination among the elderly in Shanghai is not much higher than in Hong Kong.
Authorities in Shanghai said Monday that 62% of the city’s residents over the age of 60 have been fully vaccinated and 38% have received an additional vaccine. The number of fully vaccinated people over the age of 80 is even lower, at just 15 percent, according to the Communist Party’s People’s Daily.
Jin Dongyang, a virologist at Hong Kong University, said the low death rate in Shanghai was partly due to how Covid deaths were reported in mainland China.
“The methods used by Hong Kong and the mainland to calculate deaths are completely different. “More than 90 percent of the Covid deaths reported in Hong Kong will not be counted on the continent,” he said.
In Hong Kong, a person is considered to have died from Covid if it is confirmed that he contracted the coronavirus less than 28 days before his death – even if he died from suicide or car accidents, Jin said.
“On the continent, if the deceased had major illnesses, most of them would be categorized as having died of other illnesses instead of Covid’s,” Gene said.
In Shanghai, the number of officially declared serious cases is also low. According to Wu Jinglei, director of the Shanghai Health Commission, as of Saturday, only 16 serious cases had been treated at a hospital. “One of them was fully vaccinated, the others were not vaccinated against Covid-19,” he said. Chinese health officials noted a high proportion of asymptomatic and mild cases of Omicron outbreak in the country. Wang Guiqiang, an infectious disease doctor in Beijing, told a government news conference on April 6 that this was because the Omicron variant was less virulent, people were vaccinated and that active testing had detected many cases early in the incubation period. . But Wang warned that Omicron is still dangerous for the elderly, especially those who have not received full vaccination.
This is only the second time mainland China has reported Covid deaths this year. Last month, the northeastern province of Jilin reported two deaths – the first in more than a year. Throughout 2021, mainland China reported only two Covid deaths, both in January.
Chinese officials and state media attribute the country’s low death rate to the supposed success of its Zero Covid strategy, often contrasting it with the hundreds of thousands of deaths reported in Western countries.
But the increasingly low official death toll also raises questions among many Shanghai residents as to whether it is justified to impose austerity measures that have turned the lives of millions.
The reported deaths are coming as the 25-million-strong metropolis continues to withstand a grueling blockade that has halted a vibrant, bustling business center.
Residents have been locked up in their homes for three weeks and are counting, with many complaining of food shortages, lack of medical access, poor conditions in makeshift quarantine camps and harsh measures such as separating infected children from their parents.
In China’s heavily censored social media, users have resorted to creative ways of expressing growing dissatisfaction with the continued blockade, including posting under seemingly inappropriate hashtags that deliver veiled criticism or sarcasm. But these hashtags are also often censored after attracting widespread attention.
On Sunday, the latest censored hashtag on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service, is the front line of China’s national anthem: “Get up! Those people who refuse to be slaves!”
Additional reports from Simon McCarthy and CNN’s Beijing Bureau.
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