Fact Check: Did China See A Record 37 Million COVID Cases In A Single Day?

Beijing: China is seeing a COVID-19 ‘explosion’ in the truest sense of the term.

It has emerged that nearly 37 million people may have got infected with coronavirus on a single day (December 20), according to estimates of the government’s top health authority.

The number is much higher than the previous daily record of 4 million, in January 2022, as per minutes from an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission (NHC), Bloomberg reported.

In what is by far the world’s largest outbreak, around 248 million people – which amounts to 18% of the population – are likely to have been infected by the coronavirus in the first 20 days of December.

The massive outbreak of the highly transmissible Omicron subvariants follows China’s sudden removal of COVID restrictions.

No estimate on the number of COVID deaths is available, though the minutes of the meeting cited NHC head Ma Xiaowei reiterating the narrow definition used to count COVID fatalities, Bloomberg reported.

The 37 million cases estimated for December 20 is a far cry from the official tally of just 3,049 new cases reported in China for that day.

To put things in perspective, the highest daily COVID cases reported in India was 4.14 lakh in May 2021.