BEJING: China reported nearly 13,000 Covid-related deaths in hospitals between January 13 and 19, after a top health official said the vast majority of the population has already been infected by the virus.
China a week earlier said nearly 60,000 people had died with Covid in hospitals as of January 12, but there has been widespread skepticism over official data since Beijing abruptly axed anti-virus controls last month.
China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a statement on Saturday that 681 hospitalized patients had died of respiratory failure caused by coronavirus infection, and 11,977 had died of other diseases combined with an infection over the period.
The figures do not include those who died from the virus at home.
Airfinity, an independent forecasting firm, has estimated daily Covid deaths in China will peak at around 36,000 over the Lunar New Year holiday.
The firm also estimated that more than 600,000 people have died from the disease since China abandoned the zero-Covid policy in December.
Tens of millions of people have traveled across the country in recent days for long-awaited reunions with families to mark the biggest holiday in the lunar calendar that fell on Sunday, raising fears of fresh outbreaks.
But a top health official said China will not experience a second wave of covid infections in the next two to three months after millions return to villages to mark the Lunar New Year because nearly 80 percent of the population has already been infected by the virus.
“Although a large number of people traveling during the Spring Festival may promote the spread of the epidemic to a certain extent... the current wave of epidemic has already infected about 80 percent of the people in the country,” Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in post on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform on Saturday.
“In the short term, for example, in the next two to three months, the possibility of... a second wave of the epidemic across the country is very small.”
China’s transport authorities have predicted that more than two billion trips will be made this month into February in one of the world’s largest mass movements of people.
China reports nearly 13,000 Covid deaths over last week
https://arab.news/6phu5
China reports nearly 13,000 Covid deaths over last week
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
