This article was originally published by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge. 

And just like that,

Nearly three full years after China first started reporting daily covid data which even the most naive claimed were fabricated, and just days after Beijing’s top health authority estimated that nearly 37 million Chinese were infected every single day last week as China finally gave up on its catastrophic zero-covid policy,  on Sunday China’s National Health Commission finally gave up rigging the data and announced it would stop publishing daily Covid-19 case numbers, after the accuracy of its data was questioned as millions were infected nationwide and the official tally remained strikingly low.

The data had come into question after several Chinese cities reported daily infections that far surpassed the official tally, adding to doubt about the numbers provided by the NHC. And speaking of official numbers, the 25,000 or so daily cases are just a little below the 37 million new cases revealed recently, or 250 million in 3 weeks. And speaking of official data, it looks roughly as follows:

The commission didn’t provide a reason for the change in policy in a statement on Sunday but said that the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention will release Covid-related info for studies and reference.

As reported previously, as many as a quarter billion people, or nearly 18% of the population, may have contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December, according to minutes from an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission held on Wednesday. And while hospitals in major cities including Beijing and Shanghai have been overwhelmed, while some crematoriums are “struggling to cope”, this is all a perfectly normal transition, and a long overdue step toward herd immunity, something China should have done long ago.

And since there aren’t literally piles of dead bodies strewn across China’s landscape, one can make their own conclusions about just how deadly and dangerous covid was, and how much propaganda went into the covid narrative over the past two years.

In an illustration of just how fake China’s data has been all along, consider the following:

• Zhejiang province, next to Shanghai, said it has more than 1 million daily Covid infections and expects the number to peak at 2 million, Zhejiang Daily reported Sunday, citing local officials as saying at a health briefing.
• The city of Dongguan in the southern province of Guangdong said Friday that 250,000 to 300,000 people were being infected on a daily basis.
• Qingdao city, in the eastern province of Shandong, is seeing 490,000 to 530,000 daily cases based on data projections, according to a local newspaper report.

And yet, the official NHC tally for Dec. 23 was 4,103 cases.

Of course, this is very similar to the sheer garbage reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics when it comes to the monthly jobs report, which keeps claiming that the US is generating hundreds of thousands of jobs even amid mass layoffs and a US consumer that has now imploded.

As for China, the biggest trade-off of such a stark conclusion to “zero covid” is that while China faces an even more acute economic crunch in the coming weeks (see “China’s Economy Is Showing Increasing Strain From the Covid Tsunami“), it will then come out in mid/late-January with a clean economic slate and a naturally immune population that has nothing to fear as China’s economic rebound is unleashed on the world, sending a credit impulse shockwave around the globe.

And to make sure it gets there faster, on Sunday China expanded the use of a homegrown Covid vaccine. A National Health Commission statement said that people three and above can receive a Covid vaccine developed by the Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products’ unit. Until now, it was approved only for adults. Those who are fully vaccinated with a Zhifei product can get one booster shot after six months, according to the statement. It’s unclear if Chinese “vaccines” have as many adverse and long-lasting side effects as those developed by the likes of Pfizer and Moderna.