In the first 20 days of December, about 250 million people, or 18% of the Chinese population, became infected with Covid-19. This comes amid a sudden lifting of restrictions that have contained the disease for nearly three years..

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Such figures, including 37 million people infected on Tuesday alone, were released by Sun Yang, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.. The FT was informed about this by two people familiar with the situation..

Sun said the rate of Covid spread in the country is still rising and estimated that more than half of the population in Beijing and Sichuan are already infected, people briefed on the meeting said..

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Retirement of “Zero COVID” policy.

The explosion in case numbers comes after Beijing's decision this month to abandon its previous " The Sun's numbers provided at the closed meeting contrast with those from the National Health Commission, which reported 62,592 symptomatic Covid cases over the same period..

Last week, China stopped public attempts to count the total number of infections after the authorities limited testing for Covid. The lack of information released by China about the Covid wave has led Washington and the World Health Organization to push Beijing for more transparency on the number of cases, disease severity, hospitalization numbers and other health statistics widely available by other countries..

In the Chinese capital and other cities, a wave of Covid infections has overwhelmed hospitals with an influx of elderly, bedridden patients and left the emergency room and intensive care unit with a small number of beds..

The official NHC report on the incident contained few details of what the nation's top health officials discussed..

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But during the meeting, Ma Xiaowei, director of the NHC, demanded that hospitals sort out their overcrowded emergency rooms and transfer patients to inpatient units, one of the meeting participants said.. He also urged medium and large hospitals to take in more patients with severe symptoms and promised that regulators would not hold them accountable for the increase in deaths..