The World Health Organization (WHO) says hospitals in China are filling up amid concerns about a fresh wave of Covid-19 in the country.
Dr. Michael Ryan says intensive care units (ICUs) are busy, despite officials saying the numbers are relatively low.
China’s data showed no deaths from Covid-19 on Wednesday, but there are doubts about the true impact of the disease.
Hospitals in Beijing and other cities have been overflowing in recent days as the latest Covid surge hits China.
Since 2020, China has imposed strict health restrictions as part of its zero-covid policy.
But, the government scrapped most of those measures two weeks ago after historic protests against the tight controls.
Since then, the number of cases has increased, raising fears of increased mortality among the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable.
Despite the increase, official figures show that only five people died from Covid on Tuesday and two on Monday.
This led WHO emergencies chief Dr Ryan to urge China to provide more information on the latest outbreak of the virus.
He said: “In China, relatively few cases have been reported in ICUs, but anecdotally ICUs are filling up.
“We’ve been saying for weeks that this highly contagious virus is always going to be very difficult to stop completely with public health and social measures.”
During a weekly news conference in Geneva, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “very concerned about the evolving situation in China”.
They appealed for specific data on disease severity, hospital admissions and intensive care needs.
Dr Ryan added that “vaccination is an exit strategy” for the spread of the coronavirus.
China has developed and produced its own vaccines, which have been shown to be less effective in protecting people from serious illness and death from Covid than the mRNA vaccines used in most of the world.
His comments came as the German government announced on Wednesday that it had shipped its first batch of biotech Covid-19 vaccines to China.
