One University of Hong Kong model has forecast that there could be up to a million Covid deaths in China over the coming months. That would be a political problem for the Chinese Communist Party, which prides itself (or tries to) on its competence. But it turns out the CCP has a rather elegant solution: stop counting cases, and you won’t see the scale of the deaths either.

Nobody knows for sure how high case numbers in the country are right now. At the beginning of December, the National Health Commission announced that it would no longer count asymptomatic cases. But even if you’re symptomatic, you’re unlikely to be counted in the official numbers these days. Many city testing sites were dismantled at around the same time, and home testing kits are still hard to come by.

So while at least four of my family members in China have been infected in the last few weeks, including my 81-year-old grandmother, they have not been counted in the official numbers. They were certainly symptomatic, but there is no obligation or even instruction to report to the authorities.

How many more are like this across the country? You’d be hard pressed these days to find a Chinese person who isn’t infected or doesn’t know someone who is. But with the kneecapping of its own testing capability (surely the one useful legacy of zero Covid), even the government has no idea of the real numbers. The Financial Times reports today that internal modelling estimates 250 million people – a fifth of the population – caught Covid in the first 20 days of December. That certainly tallies with my family’s experience and the trending discussions on Chinese social media, and yet the official public Covid count was just under 63,000 cases for that period. Experts across the country are claiming that the peak of the wave may come in January, claims that have been questioned by some Chinese journalists asking, how do you know if you don’t know what the real number of cases are?

Thankfully, my grandma seems to be over the worst of it now, but how many others will not be? Officially, there have been only eight Covid deaths since the beginning of December, yet journalists on the ground in China have visited packed crematoriums that paint a different picture. Zero Covid had to go, but the government has botched the opening up. Destroying its extensive testing capability will go down as one of Beijing’s biggest mistakes.