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The Chinese government has declared a “decisive victory” in the battle against Covid-19, claiming that it had created “a miracle in the history of human civilisation” in successfully steering China through the global pandemic.
The comments were made at a meeting presided over by President Xi Jinping on Thursday. The government said more than 200 million people had been treated for Covid and that China’s death rate from coronavirus was “the lowest level in the world”.
China’s National Health Commission stopped publishing data on Covid cases and deaths on 25 December, after the government suddenly lifted the draconian zero-Covid policies that had restricted movement in the country for almost three years.
On 9 February, it said 83,150 people had died from Covid, which would be an unusually low rate for a country grappling with a wave of the Omicron variant. But there are many other indicators that suggest the virus has ripped through China since December, causing a far higher number of illnesses and deaths than the official data suggests.
