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China Reports Almost 60,000 COVID-related Deaths

People wear protective face shields enter the Beijing Railway Station as the annual Spring Festival travel rush starts, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year, in Beijing, China January 7, 2023. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
People wear protective face shields enter the Beijing Railway Station as the annual Spring Festival travel rush starts, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year, in Beijing, China January 7, 2023. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
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China Reports Almost 60,000 COVID-related Deaths

People wear protective face shields enter the Beijing Railway Station as the annual Spring Festival travel rush starts, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year, in Beijing, China January 7, 2023. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
People wear protective face shields enter the Beijing Railway Station as the annual Spring Festival travel rush starts, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year, in Beijing, China January 7, 2023. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang

China on Saturday reported nearly 60,000 deaths in people who had COVID-19 since early December following complaints the government was failing to release data about the status of the pandemic.

The death toll included 5,503 deaths due to respiratory failure caused by the coronavirus and 54,435 fatalities from other ailments combined with COVID-19. The National Health Commission said those deaths occurred in hospitals, which left open the possibility more people also might have died at home.

The report would more than double China’s official COVID-19 death toll to 10,775. The official toll stood at 5,272 on Jan. 8.

The Chinese government stopped reporting data on COVID-19 infections and deaths in early December after abruptly lifting anti-virus controls. The World Health Organization and other governments appealed to Beijing for more information amid a surge in infections.

Wen Daxiang, a Shanghai Health Commission official, said China would strengthen health monitoring and management of the high-risk population.

He added that China would bolster the supply of drugs and medical equipment, and beef up training of grassroots medical workers to combat COVID in rural regions.

Meanwhile, people in China are resuming travel ahead of the Lunar New Year, despite worries about infections.

The rapid business recovery is challenging airlines' ability to ensure safety, and great attention to pandemic-related risks is needed, said Song Zhiyong, head of the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

The industry needs to "fully understand the special nature, and complexity of the Spring Festival migration in 2023", Song said in a statement on Friday.

Since the Jan. 7 start of the annual migration, as Chinese return to their hometowns in preparation for the holiday set to begin on Jan. 21, flight passenger numbers stand at 63% of the 2019 figure before the pandemic, the aviation regulator said.

China re-opened its borders on Jan. 8 after having abruptly abandoned in December a strict anti-virus regime of frequent testing, travel curbs and mass lockdowns that had fueled historic nationwide protests in late November.

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Russia Warns the United States against Possible Nuclear Testing under Trump

A woman takes a tour of the Bunker-703, a recently declassified nuclear-resistant bomb shelter built in 1961 at a depth of 43 meters (141 feet) for the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry archive, in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024. (AP)
A woman takes a tour of the Bunker-703, a recently declassified nuclear-resistant bomb shelter built in 1961 at a depth of 43 meters (141 feet) for the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry archive, in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024. (AP)
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Russia Warns the United States against Possible Nuclear Testing under Trump

A woman takes a tour of the Bunker-703, a recently declassified nuclear-resistant bomb shelter built in 1961 at a depth of 43 meters (141 feet) for the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry archive, in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024. (AP)
A woman takes a tour of the Bunker-703, a recently declassified nuclear-resistant bomb shelter built in 1961 at a depth of 43 meters (141 feet) for the Soviet Foreign Affairs Ministry archive, in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024. (AP)

Russia's point man for arms control cautioned Donald Trump's incoming administration on Friday against resuming nuclear testing, saying Moscow would keep its own options open amid what he said was Washington's "extremely hostile" stance.

The resumption of testing by the world's two biggest nuclear powers would usher in a new and precarious era nearly 80 years since the United States tested the first nuclear bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945.

Russia, the United States and China are all undertaking major modernizations of their nuclear arsenals just as the arms control treaties of the Cold War era between the Soviet Union and the United States crumble.

In an explicit signal to Washington, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who oversees arms control, said Trump had taken a radical position on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) during his first term.

"The international situation is extremely difficult at the moment, the American policy in its various aspects is extremely hostile to us today," Ryabkov was quoted as saying in an interview with Russia's Kommersant newspaper.

"So, the options for us to act in the interests of ensuring security and the potential measures and actions we have to do this - and to send politically appropriate signals... does not rule anything out."

During Trump's first 2017-2021 term as president, his administration discussed whether or not to conduct the first US nuclear test since 1992, the Washington Post reported in 2020.

In 2023 President Vladimir Putin formally revoked Russia's ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), bringing his country into line with the United States.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed by Russia in 1996 and ratified in 2000. The United States signed the treaty in 1996 but has not ratified it.

NUCLEAR TEST?

There are fears among some arms control experts that the United States is moving towards a return to testing as a way to develop new weapons and at the same time send a signal to rivals such as Russia and China.

Russia, with 5,580 warheads, and the United States, with 5,044, are by far the world's biggest nuclear powers, holding about 88% of the world's nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists. China has about 500 warheads.

In the five decades between 1945 and the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, over 2,000 nuclear tests were carried out, 1,032 of them by the United States and 715 of them by the Soviet Union, according to the United Nations.

Post-Soviet Russia has not carried out a nuclear test. The Soviet Union last tested in 1990.

Putin has said Russia would consider testing a nuclear weapon if the United States did. Last month Putin lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, and after Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with US-made ATACMS missiles.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, only a few countries have tested nuclear weapons, according to the Arms Control Association: the United States last tested in 1992, China and France in 1996, India and Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2017.