Experts say the CCP continues to underreport the scale of the outbreak, as it spreads to Hong Kong and Taiwan.
China’s official COVID-19 infection rates doubled in April, according to the latest report from the communist regime’s health authorities. Meanwhile, since early May, Chinese citizens across the country have been reporting a new wave of respiratory infections, causing hospitals to become overcrowded again.
Experts who spoke with the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times suspect the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to cover up and downplay the true scale of the COVID-19 outbreak in the country, noting that Hong Kong and Taiwan have reported an increase in infections in recent weeks.
The May 8 report published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) acknowledged that the COVID-19 positive rate in China—excluding Hong Kong and Macau—had jumped from 7.5 percent in the first week of April to 16.2 percent from April 28 to May 4.
The China CDC’s report said that the main pathogens detected in respiratory samples of patients with influenza-like symptoms in outpatient and emergency departments of sentinel hospitals were SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, rhinovirus, and human parainfluenza virus.
Beijing’s Chaoyang District Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued a notice on May 12, attributing the rising COVID-19 infections in the region to the NB.1 strain, a descendant of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron recombinant lineage XDV, which is closely related to the JN.1 subvariant, itself a descendant of BA.2.86.
XDV-related recombinant variant XBB caused a massive outbreak of COVID-19 in China from late 2022 to 2023, according to the health agency.
As of May 19, the COVID-19 infection report on the China CDC website hasn’t been updated since March, which reported 131 “severe cases” and seven deaths.
“China’s CDC has not reported the rate of severe cases, hospitalization rate, or mortality rate. Therefore, the outside world cannot know the actual situation,” Sean Lin, assistant professor at the Biomedical Science Department of Feitian College and former U.S. Army microbiologist, told The Epoch Times on May 17.
“The number of infections in mainland China has certainly increased recently, but Beijing doesn’t even report the actual number of infections, only the positive rate, which is misleading the public,” Lin said.
By Alex Wu
