Data from Baidu, China’s leading search engine, strongly suggest that the country’s current surge in cases dwarfs any previous increase
China knows how many people in the country have contracted covid-19 or died from it in recent weeks. The Chinese government, which recently abandoned the “zero-covid” strategy of strict lockdowns and isolation requirements that it had maintained since the start of the pandemic, is probably modelling the outbreak, but not sharing its estimates. Since December 1st it has reported an official death toll from the disease of just nine people.
For example, in America, an outstanding predictor of case counts early in the pandemic was Google searches for the loss of taste or smell. Once covid tests became widely available in America, day-to-day changes in the number of such searches moved nearly in lockstep with changes in the reported case count eight or nine days later. The steepest spike of all in search interest for anosmia occurred in March 2020, a period when the disease first struck America but tests were few and far between.
Since covid first emerged in China in late 2019, the government has probably undercounted the human toll. It reported 4,684 deaths attributable to the disease between January 20th and April 20th 2020, and has logged just 558 since then. Although this figure is most likely to be too low, the magnitude of the underestimation is shrouded in uncertainty. The official statistics do not provide any way to determine if China is truly experiencing an outbreak of unprecedented scale.
Such interest might result at least in part from people who do not currently have covid but want to stock up on tests and medicines. However, Baidu also recorded remarkably steep increases in interest in “fever” and “blood oxygen”, which increased by factors of 32 and 19 relative to the average during September and October, and eight relative to the prior record.
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