The official report is deliberately vague about whether the influenza virus strain spreading in China is drug-resistant, a U.S. expert on the China CDC said.
China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) has released its official data for March on COVID-19, influenza, and other respiratory viruses spreading in China, which has sparked some skeptical reactions from experts.
Mainland Chinese citizens suspect that the authorities are continuing to cover up the truth about respiratory disease epidemics in China, as official data continue to not match their lived experience.
In its report on the national COVID-19 epidemic situation for March, released on April 21, the China CDC said, “the COVID-19 epidemic in March showed a fluctuating upward trend but overall it remained at a low level.”
The latest China CDC weekly update on “National sentinel surveillance of acute respiratory infectious diseases” was for the week of March 24 to March 30, and was issued on April 3. The CDC said in the weekly report that it collected respiratory samples from outpatient influenza-like cases and hospitalized severe acute respiratory infection cases in sentinel hospitals across the country, excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.
The test results showed that the main pathogens detected in outpatient respiratory samples were rhinovirus, COVID-19, and human metapneumovirus; the main pathogens detected positively in respiratory samples of hospitalized severe acute respiratory infection cases were respiratory syncytial virus, rhinovirus, and human metapneumovirus.
“This is a very vague and simple statistical report,” Sean Lin, assistant professor in the Biomedical Science Department at Feitian College and former U.S. army microbiologist, told The Epoch Times on April 25, as the report “did not provide the specific number of cases or samples tested.”
Lin noted that the reporting did not include human infections of avian influenza (bird flu). In early March, the Chinese regime admitted “sporadic” cases of human avian influenza infections had been occurring in China at a “relatively low level.” It didn’t specify the virus strains or the areas where they occurred.
The Epoch Times also reported that the China CDC reported 127 cases of infection with the mutated strain of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza in March, which is more contagious, in an internal document that was leaked—showing that the CDC does have such data on H5N1.
By Alex Wu
