China Reports No New Local COVID Cases, First In 2 Months, But Can Data Be Trusted?

After witnessing a surge in COVID-19 cases, official data on Monday showed that China reported no new locally transmitted cases for the first time in nearly two months.

However, China has been accused of fudging data and under-reporting cases, raising questions over the accuracy of its official COVID numbers.

In a statement Monday, China's National Health Commission (NHC) said that the total number of COVID-19 cases rose to 14 on Feb. 7, but they were all imported cases, either from people entering the country or imported contaminated frozen food. Seven were in Shanghai and the others in Guangdong province.

This was the first time since Dec. 16 when China reported zero local infections, according to Reuters. The country took aggressive measures to curb the rise in new cases, including using anal swab method to test for COVID-19.

China also imposed travel curbs and tightened internal restrictions as it faced a new wave of infections ahead of the Lunar New Year, which begins Feb. 12. It has asked people to avoid “non-essential” travel during the holiday period to prevent another spike in cases.

The surge came as World Health Organization (WHO) investigators have been in quarantine in Wuhan investigating the origins of the pandemic that has led to the death of 2 million people worldwide. COVID-19 was first detected in Wuhun in late 2019.

The NHC also said that the number of new asymptomatic cases rose to 16. China does not count asymptomatic cases as confirmed COVID-19 cases.

There have been concerns that China, accused of mishandling the pandemic, is hiding its true COVID numbers. The U.S. intelligence community said in a classified report that China concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in the country and under-reported deaths as well as infections, Bloomberg noted last year.

The NHC also revised guidelines on how it counts confirmed COVID-19 cases several times in the past year, with international researchers saying that the changes made China lose a lot of credibility and faith in the accuracy of its data.

A CNN report from last year also detailed how China downplayed the virus and “gave the world more optimistic data than they had access to internally.” China’s internal documents showed how local health authorities in Hubei listed a total of 5,918 new cases on Feb. 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, the report added.