China has reported the deaths of three people from Covid in Shanghai for the first time since the financial hub entered lockdown in late March.
A release from the city health commission said the victims were aged between 89 and 91 and unvaccinated.
Shanghai officials said only 38% of residents over 60 are fully vaccinated.
The city is now due to enter another round of mass testing, which means a strict lockdown will continue into a fourth week for most residents.
Until now, China had maintained that no-one died of Covid in the city – a claim that has increasingly come into question.
Monday’s deaths were also the first Covid-linked fatalities to be officially acknowledged by authorities in the entire country since March 2020.
The timing of this announcement is odd.
Firstly because, up to this point, it was a miraculous stretch of credulity to think that no-one in a city of almost 25 million people had succumbed to this wave of the virus.
But second, and more importantly, we know that people HAVE already died after contracting Covid in this outbreak. We have reported that.
It happened to dozens of elderly patients at a single hospital in Shanghai. But they were not official Covid deaths, according to the authorities. They died of underlying problems, apparently.
So what’s changed? The answer is nothing seems to have changed in terms of clinical assessments.
People with underlying health problems died after testing positive but the death rate remained at zero.
Now three people have died in very similar circumstances but the official death toll has increased.
It’s fair to ask – is this because the authorities have decided they need to make public the dangers of this vast wave of a virus against which barely half of China’s over 60’s are fully vaccinated?
Because up to now this was a virus that Shanghai’s authorities had warned could devastate the population – otherwise why else would they lock down the city – yet it hadn’t officially killed anyone.