Beijing: China's National Health Commission, which for the past three years or so has published daily COVID-19 case figures for the country, said it will no longer release such data from Sunday.

"Relevant COVID information will be published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention for reference and research," the NHC said in a statement, without specifying the reasons for the change or how frequently China CDC will update COVID information.

Around 250 million people in China may have caught Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, multiple reports have said according to an internal estimate from the nation’s top health officials.

If the estimates are correct, then it accounts for around 18 percent of China’s 1.4 billion population and becomes the largest Covid-19 outbreak ever recorded across the globe, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times reported Friday.

The figures are in stark contrast to the public data of the NHC, which reported just 62,592 symptomatic Covid cases in the first twenty days of December.

A copy of the NHC meeting notes was circulated on Chinese social media on Friday. However, the authenticity of the document could not be established.

The report said that China recorded 37 million Covid infections on Tuesday alone. However, the figure contradicted the official number of 3,049 new infections reported that day.