China outwardly managed to avoid the worsts effects of the pandemic over the past few years. But that reprieve appears to be at an end:

Almost 250 million people in China may have caught Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate from the nation's top health officials, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times reported Friday.

If correct, the estimate – which CNN cannot independently confirm – would account for roughly 18% of China's 1.4 billion people and represent the largest Covid-19 outbreak to date globally.

Now, just an aside here:

Everything you see come out of official Chinese Communist Party channels should reflexively be mistrusted. Communists tend to lie about pretty much anything and everything. And you could easily think of some good reasons for the CCP to lie about this sort of thing: Maybe they want to freak the rest of the world out into shutting down again, or something.

And frankly, the whole thing does have the weird feel of a clumsy sort of psyops:

Among the estimates cited in both reports, was the revelation that on Tuesday alone, 37 million people were newly infected with Covid-19 across China. That stood in dramatic contrast to the official number of 3,049 new infections reported that day.

The Financial Times said it was Sun Yang – a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention – who presented the figures to officials during the closed-door briefing, citing two people familiar with the matter.

You can't exactly blame China for trying, of course — they freaked the world out in March of 2020 and sent the entire planet into a destructive, economy-ruining lockdown. So it wouldn't be surprising if they tried to do it again.