China's Covid death data hides true toll: Report
India TV NewsChina Covid update: The nearly 60,000 Covid-related deaths China reported for the first five weeks of its current outbreak, the largest the world has ever seen, may underestimate the true toll by hundreds of thousands of fatalities, experts were quoted as saying in a media report. China's abrupt pivot from Covid Zero in early December unleashed a surge of omicron infections and led to 59,938 virus-related deaths in the nation's hospitals through January 12, Bloomberg news agency reported, citing the figures disclosed by the National Health Commission. While the number swamps the few dozen deaths previously recorded in the official tally - which drew widespread criticism both at home and abroad, including from the World Health Organization - experts say it's still likely to be an underestimate given the enormous scale of the outbreak and the mortality rates seen at the height of omicron waves in other countries that initially pursued a Covid Zero strategy, the news agency reported. "These figures would suggest that China is having a very mild wave, with very few deaths per case," Louise Blair, head of vaccines and epidemiology at the London-based predictive health analytics firm Airfinity, was quoted by the news agency as saying.