From January 13 to 19, China reportedly witnessed around 13,000 Covid-related deaths in hospitals, news agency AFP reported on Sunday citing a top health official. The virus has already infected the vast majority of the population.
A week earlier, China reported that nearly 60,000 people had died from Covid in hospitals as of January 12, but official data has been widely questioned.
According to a statement issued by China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Saturday, 681 hospitalised patients died of respiratory failure caused by coronavirus infection, and 11,977 died of other diseases associated with an infection during the same time period.
The statistics do not reflect those who passed away at home due to the virus.
Chinese President Xi Jinping had also expressed concern about Covid wave spreading to rural areas with inadequate medical resources, but he encouraged perseverance in trying times by saying that "light is ahead".
His remarks came at a time when millions of urban workers were returning to their hometowns to celebrate the Lunar New Year (LNY), which was regarded before Covid as the largest annual migration of people.
According to Airfinity, an independent forecasting firm, daily Covid deaths in China will peak at around 36,000 during the Lunar New Year holiday.
As per the firm, over 600,000 people have died from the disease since China abandoned its zero-Covid policy in December.
Tens of millions of people have recently travelled across the nation in anticipation of long-awaited family reunions to commemorate the biggest holiday in the lunar calendar, which fell on Sunday. This has caused concerns about new outbreaks.
Although millions of people will return to their villages to celebrate the Lunar New Year, a top health official predicted that China won't see a second wave of covid infections in the following two to three months because almost 80 per cent of the population has already contracted the virus.
"Although a large number of people travelling during the Spring Festival may promote the spread of the epidemic to a certain extent... the current wave of the 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 a 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 transportation authorities predict that more than two billion trips will be made this month and into February, in one of the world's largest human migrations.
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