STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Didn't Do It

Did China declare a state of emergency over a spike in multiple respiratory infections as of January 3, 2025? No, that's not true: As of January 3, 2025, China's official sources made no such announcement. A spokesperson for the World Health Organization told Lead Stories that China's Center for Disease Control & Prevention reported an increase in respiratory illnesses but the available data suggested that, as of January 3, 2025, its overall scale was lower than a year ago.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads where it was published on January 2, 2025. It opened:

China declares a state of emergency as a surge of multiple viruses, including Influenza A, HMPV, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, and COVID-19, overwhelms hospitals and crematoriums 😬

The rapid spread has created an unprecedented healthcare crisis... #BreakingNews #ChinaHealthCrisis #GlobalPandemic #VirusOutbreak #PublicHealth #COVID19 #InfluenzaA #HMPV #HealthEmergency #HealthcareCrisis #StaySafe #GlobalHealth #PandemicResponse #WorldNews #ViralOutbreak

This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:

(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Fri Jan 3 17:32:59 2025 UTC)

The National Health Commission of China, the body responsible for public health matters, said nothing about a recent emergency declaration in its website's news section (archived here).

China's State Council Information Office, which is responsible for public communication, made no such announcements (archived here).

China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Mao Ning, didn't mention the purported emergency declaration during her most recent press conference on January 2, 2025 (archived here).

A search for the word "emergency" on the website of China's official news agency Xinhua (archived here) didn't produce any relevant results corroborating the claim.

The U.S. Department of State China Travel Advisory's last update on November 27, 2024, (archived here) didn't discuss any massive health emergencies.

The list of U.S. Embassy and Consulates emergency alerts for U.S. citizens (archived here) said nothing about it, either.

A spokesperson for the World Health Organization told Lead Stories via email on January 3, 2025:

China's Center for Disease Control & Prevention (China CDC) surveillance data from 16-22 December 2024 indicated that although there had been a rise in acute respiratory infections - including seasonal influenza, human metapneumovirus (hMPV), rhinovirus infection, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and others - particularly in northern provinces of China, the scale and intensity of infectious respiratory presentation were lower than during the same period last year.

Here is what the influenza data looked like on FluNet, which is a WHO resource used to gather the respective information:

(Source: FluNet screenshot taken on Fri Jan 3 22:46:58 2025 UTC)

Claim's origin

The account that published the claim reviewed in this fact check was not an established media organization or a research institution -- it was a resource linked to a trading-promoting website.

The image recycled in the post wasn't recent. According to the reverse image search tool TinEye, it has been online since at least December 2022:

(Source: TinEye screenshot taken on Fri Jan 3 15:48:27 2025 UTC)

The post on Threads followed a Chinese-language article (arrived here) published on December 28, 2024, by the website Aboluowang.com. As translated by Chrome, it claimed that "many people said that this wave of so-called 'flu' was comparable to the outbreak of the new coronavirus three years ago." The piece cited unverified videos from Gan Jing World, a social media platform similar to YouTube headquartered in Middletown, New York (archived here) and described by Columbia Journalism Review (archived here) as "aligned" with the Falun Gong movement.

As geolocated by Lead Stories, at least one of the videos in question (archived here) showed Beijing Children's Hospital, whose characteristic ceiling panels with hollow circles in the middle can also be seen in stock images from 2023 (archived here). At the time, the healthcare facility's director told (archived here) Chinese state media, as translated by Chrome, that "the hospital's internal medicine department currently sees more than 7,000 patients per day, far exceeding the hospital's carrying capacity" due to an outbreak in flu-like respiratory illnesses.

A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) between December 1, 2024, and this writing didn't produce any results confirming that the facility was overwhelmed again. The hospital's official channel on Weibo (archived here) didn't say that either.

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Other Lead Stories fact checks concerning health can be found here.

Additional fact checks concerning international affairs are here.