TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — After months of delays, China omitted cremation data in its social welfare report last week, raising questions about the number of deaths caused by the surge in COVID infections in the country in late 2022.

The Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs usually releases quarterly statistics on marriages, divorces, and cremations within three months after the previous quarter. However, the ministry did not release summary statistics on the marriages and social welfare until June 9.

Absent from the report for the first time was cremation data, figures that the ministry had regularly released in its fourth quarter report since 2007, reported VOA. The ministry did not provide any explanation for the postponement of the report and the disappearance of the cremation numbers.

The lack of data hampers efforts to make an accurate assessment of the actual impact of the surge of COVID infections caused by China's sudden abandonment of zero-COVID controls in late December. In January, CNN cited WHO Executive Director for Health Emergencies Mike Ryan as saying the data released by Beijing "under-represent the true impact of the disease” when it comes to hospital and ICU admissions, along with deaths.

On Nov. 11, 2022, Beijing issued 20 measures designed to ease the country's zero-COVID policy and cases started to rapidly rise. After a deadly fire broke out at an apartment in Urumqi amid a lockdown in Xinjiang in late November, some Chinese citizens began to protest China's COVID restrictions.

Amid intensifying public protests, Beijing lifted all COVID controls on Dec. 7. China's sudden pivot led to a massive surge in cases, according to The Guardian.  

According to allegedly leaked minutes from the Dec. 21 meeting of China's National Health Commission (NHC), the number of infections from Dec. 1-20 reached 248 million people, accounting for 17.56% of the population. By January, the China CDC’s chief epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, announced in a Weibo post that 80% of the population had been infected by the winter outbreak, indicating that 1.1 billion citizens would have contracted the virus, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.

In February, the New York Times cited studies by four academic teams that gave estimates of deaths in China from the winter outbreak between 970,000 to 1.6 million. However, China's official death toll from mid-December to early February was 83,150 and researchers believe part of this "vast undercount" was due to China's narrow definition of what constitutes a COVID death.

CNN cited Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, as saying that the cremation data is important because it can "provide relatively accurate information about excess deaths." Huang explained that comparing cremation numbers from the fourth quarter with those of other years would enable researchers to estimate excess deaths, a strong indicator of the number of people who died from COVID.

However, Huang pointed out that because China has excluded this data "it signals that the number of excess deaths could be significant."

In December 2022, Wu Zunyou pledged that Beijing would calculate and release figures on excess deaths, reported The Guardian. However, this data has yet to be released to the public.