Evidence suggests that China managed to contain Covid for almost three years following the initial outbreak in Wuhan – through a combination of strict border closures and brutal lockdowns. Yet in December of 2022, the country finally abandoned its contentious zero-Covid policy, leading to a surge of cases.
How many people died in this post-zero-Covid outbreak? Because the Chinese government doesn’t publish accurate or timely data on Covid deaths, it was very difficult to know. And the official figure of 60,000 always seemed implausibly low.
Thanks to a new paper by Hong Xiao and colleagues, we now have a decent estimate: 1.87 million among people aged 30 and older (who of course account for the vast majority of deaths). That’s about 32 times greater than the official count.
How did the researchers arrive at this figure? Their method was quite clever. Xiao and colleagues began by tracking the number of obituaries for three major universities: Peking University and Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin. (The New York Times also used obituaries to show there was a spike in deaths around the time China abandoned zero-Covid.)
Here’s the clever part. The researchers correlated changes in the number of obituaries with changes in the number of Baidu searches for the terms ‘burial’, ‘cremation’, ‘crematorium’ and ‘funeral parlour’ in the corresponding regions. (Baidu is China’s equivalent to Google). They found that the relationship was extremely strong: obituaries and mortality-related searches shot up at precisely the same time.
This allowed them to work out by how much mortality rises when mortality-related search terms increase by a given amount. For example, the number of obituaries for the two Beijing universities rose by 400% in December of 2022, while mortality-related search terms in that region approximately doubled (an increase of 100%).
Since they had Baidu search data for every region of China, they were able to estimate the number of excess deaths in each region based on that region’s increase in mortality-related search terms. (Every region of China except Tibet saw a clear increase in mortality-related search terms in December of 2022.)
As noted above, their calculations yielded a figure of 1.87 million for the total number of excess deaths. This represents an increase of about 20% over the average number of deaths from 2015–2019, which means that China saw about the same level of excess mortality as France and Germany.
It seems that you can run from Covid but you can’t hide. Despite suppressing the virus for almost three years – going as far as locking people in their homes and forcing them into quarantine camps – China saw about the same level of excess mortality as major Western countries. The Chinese turned their entire society upside down fighting Covid, and in the end did no better than the Swedes.
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