Earlier this week there were multiple reports from China about funeral parlors and crematoriums running above full capacity. A projection by a US based health group concluded that up to a million people in China could die from the virus now that China has abandoned its zero COVID approach. While all of this was happening under the gaze of foreign media outlets, official numbers from China said only a handful of people had died this month. Clearly something didn’t add up.

Yesterday Bloomberg reported that leaked estimates from China’s top health authority paint a very different picture. China’s National Health Commission (NHC) held a meeting on Wednesday and the figures used in that meeting suggest about 18% of China’s entire population has come down with COVID this month.

Almost 250 million people in China may have caught Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate from the nation’s top health officials…

Among the estimates cited in both reports, was the revelation that on Tuesday alone, 37 million people were newly infected with Covid-19 across China. That stood in dramatic contrast to the official number of 3,049 new infections reported that day.

The Financial Times said it was Sun Yang – a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention – who presented the figures to officials during the closed-door briefing, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Sun explained that the rate of Covid’s spread in China was still rising and estimated that more than half of the population in Beijing and Sichuan were already infected, according to the Financial Times.

It’s not clear where these figures come from because China has essentially stopped testing everyone all the time. Still the numbers are order of magnitude different from the official numbers released by the NHC. So far this month they have reported about 65,000 symptomatic COVID cases and just 8 deaths.

What we know for certain is that the official figures aren’t right. There are multiple videos available on Twitter showing far more than 8 deaths in a single hospital.

Here is the video of the hospital morgue pic.twitter.com/Ur1PKOYEcI

— Wang Xiangwei (@wangxiangweihk) December 22, 2022

There are a bunch of videos like this but because of how China is counting COVID deaths most of these deaths won’t be counted in the official statistics.

China has officially reported two deaths in Beijing during the latest Covid surge but crematoriums are saying they’ve run out of space to put the bodies. #china pic.twitter.com/KSgzfJOUAU

— China Uncensored (@ChinaUncensored) December 22, 2022

There are some videos, which I’ll spare you, showing people collapsing in the street, similar to the ones we saw in the early days of the pandemic. But true to form, China cares more about saving face than telling the truth about what is going on. So state media propagandists like Hu Xijin are posting videos like this one. The idea is that things can’t be as bad in China as foreign media claims because lots of young people are out Christmas shopping.

A friend of mine recorded the video at Wangfujing Commercial Street in Beijing. It seems Beijing has raised the curtain of post-epidemic recovery and prosperity on a large scale tonight. pic.twitter.com/26lX2zCLmt

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) December 24, 2022

Of course the fact that lots of younger and healthier people are going about their business doesn’t mean that lots of older and less healthy people aren’t currently overwhelming hospitals, funeral parlors or morgues in Beijing and Shanghai. Both things can be true at once.

The South China Morning Post is predicting that the peak number of infections nationwide will happen sometime in January.

Ben Cowling, chair professor of epidemiology and head of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Hong Kong’s school of public health, agreed that some cities like Beijing might have already passed their peak.

“I think nationwide the peak in infections will be in early January. Some cities like Beijing may already have passed their peak,” he said.

Wang Guangfa, a respiratory expert at Peking University First Hospital, told medical news portal Yixuejie that the capital should brace for a peak in severe diseases in one or two weeks, adding that cases would ease only after the Lunar New Year holiday in late January.

“We probably have to wait until February or March before things return to normal,” he was quoted as saying.

So this is going to get worse before it gets better. China’s government will continue to lie about the number of infections and the number of deaths despite evidence showing otherwise. Hopefully this won’t be the last leak that gives us a hint of what the actual numbers look like.