China stops counting cases as models predict a million or more deaths

(BMJ) China has effectively stopped counting covid cases and deaths, abandoning mass testing and adopting new criteria for counting deaths that will exclude most fatalities from being reported. The Chinese National Health Commission’s official daily briefing, which had offered detailed if uninformative statistics every day since February 2020, has not been published since 24 December. The commission did not respond to The BMJ’s questions about why the briefing stopped.