248 million new COVID-19 cases confirmed in China for 20 days

According to Bloomberg and other media outlets, Chinese authorities estimated in the closed internal meeting that around 250 million people in China were infected with COVID-19 this month.

Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and Mingbo quoted data from the internal meeting of the National Health Commission of China on Wednesday to report that approximately 248 million people in China, or about 18% of the country's population of 1.4 billion, were infected with COVID-19 for the first twenty days of this month. The Financial Times reported that Sun Yang, the deputy director of the National Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention, shared this information.

Bloomberg reported, “At the closed meeting, it was announced that an estimated 37 million people across China were infected just on Tuesday.” The Chinese government officially announced that 3,049 new cases were confirmed on that day.

The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in China has reportedly been rapidly increasing since the Chinese government abandoned its policy of sealing off areas with even a single confirmed case on Dec. 7. If the estimate by Chinese authorities is accurate, this will represent the largest number of confirmed cases in the world within just 20 days. On Friday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that the cumulative number of confirmed cases in the U.S. had officially surpassed 100 million over the past three years.

Bloomberg reported that the Chinese government was planning to fully open its borders, including ending mandatory quarantine for those coming from abroad, starting in January next year. If this plan is implemented, it will lead to increased people-to-people exchanges between China and the rest of the world, including those between China and Korea.


Ki-Yong Kim kky@donga.com