China’s True COVID-19 Death Toll Could Reach 36 Times the Official Estimate: Expert

As of Jan. 8, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) only reported a cumulative total of 5,272 COVID-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

But after the Chinese communist regime relaxed its zero-COVID restrictions, the same institution suddenly announced that from Dec. 8, 2022, to Jan. 12, 2023, China had accumulated nearly 60,000 deaths from COVID-19 infections.

However, China’s true COVID-19 death toll could reach 36 times the official estimate, according to George Calhoun, director of the Quantitative Finance Program at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Calhoun said that different model estimates of death rates suggest that the death toll in China is likely to climb into the millions.

He pointed to one measurement approach referred to as “excess mortality overall,” which examines “the trend in the death rate per 100,000 population in the data that the WHO and the UN will routinely collect on all countries.”

“In China, it moves along until 2019, and then inflects upwards, and that inflection in 2019, 2020, and 2021 amounts to about a million unexplained excess deaths above the trend,” Calhoun told the “China in Focus” on NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet, on March 11.

“I think that’s the starting point that something was happening, there was some kind of public health crisis that added at least 1 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021. What could that public health crisis have been? Well, I think COVID is probably at the top of the list for answering that question,” he added.

Another approach that some groups have taken, he said, is to try to develop a demographic model based upon comparing the experiences of other countries.

He singled out the extensive modeling program presented by the Economist magazine. “They came up with a number of something like 1.7 million excess deaths due to COVID … until December of 2022.”

Calhoun said that “those numbers today are coming in at anywhere between one and 3 million.”

Multiple Variants

The fact that China’s official data does not add up proves the communist regime’s continuing suppression of figures, he said.

“All of the numbers that have been reported after the first 90 days in Wuhan, those numbers were probably accurate for that area in that small time-frame,” he said. “But about the 1st of April 2020, the Chinese statistics just shut down on reporting COVID mortality—reporting anything, really, related to COVID.

“In fact, you went about two years [where] there were no COVID cases reported at all, which is just an impossibility,” he said.

“I think in China there was clearly an active decision, after April of 2020, to suppress the data pretty much completely, and that’s continuing,” he added.

Calhoun said that one of the side effects of the lockdown was that the Chinese regime “didn’t allow the development of even some degree of natural immunity in the population.”

The lack of natural immunity in China could have dire consequences, he said. “The impact may be that it’s not the Omicron variant, and maybe that it’s one of the earlier variants that is surging through the population,” he said.

Why Should Americans Care?

In Calhoun’s opinion, Americans should pay attention to the COVID-19 situation in China, as he said the CCP virus originally came out of that country. “Demographically, China seems to be the source of many of the viruses, the flu virus and others that affect a larger global population.”

As a result, he said the United States should “observe what’s going on in China, to observe quickly as any new variants emerge,” in order to “have good visibility, fully transparent, and up to date, as accurate as possible.”

However, Calhoun took note of the Chinese communist regime’s lack of cooperation with the international community. “The destruction of data, the hiding of information, the suppression of reports of all sorts, making it difficult for even the World Health Organization (WHO) to investigate: All of that has put a big cloud of uncertainty over this very critical part of the epidemiological chain,” he said.

“If all of these variants are going to emerge from the Chinese population first, and we have no visibility to that, that’s a big handicap for health authorities everywhere else in the world.”

Ella Kietlinska and Joshua Philipp contributed to this report.