Local officials in China have been accused of not reporting data on COVID-19 positive cases in fear of a backlash from Beijing. Instead, the authorities have extended the draconian lockdown policies in an attempt to contain the virus. Some experts have called China’s “dynamic zero-COVID” policy a measure driven by political motives. An independent analyst in the United States and expert on China, Shi Shan, told The Epoch Times that local officials in Shanghai would be held accountable for positive COVID-19 cases in their jurisdictions. As a result, many have chosen to conceal or grossly underreport the data in their region or resorted to extreme lockdown measures to contain the virus as quickly as possible. According to Shi, these local officials knew that the Omicron variant of the CCP virus has a low mortality rate, and symptoms are often mild. Yet, many of them fudged the data out of fear …