The Chinese communist government admitted early on Friday that the coronavirus numbers that it had reported in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, were not accurate.
“China has revised its official count of deaths from the coronavirus, adding some 1,290 deaths in Wuhan, the city where the virus first emerged last December,” Bloomberg News reported. “The addition, reported by state media on Friday, brings the nationwide death toll to 4,636, the majority coming from Hubei province, where Wuhan is located.”
“The additional deaths were all counted in Wuhan and the late reporting of deaths are due to several reasons, said the report,” the report added. “The first is that some patients died at home without seeing a doctor or being tested for the virus as hospitals were overwhelmed during the epidemic’s peak.”
The new numbers being reported by China are still likely to fall well short of the real numbers as The Washington Post estimated during the first week in April that the real number of deaths in Wuhan were 16 times higher than what China reported:
The coronavirus pandemic ravaging the globe officially claimed 2,563 lives in Wuhan, where it began in a market that sold exotic animals for consumption. But evidence emerging from the city as it stirs from its two-month hibernation suggests the real death toll is exponentially higher. …Using photos posted online, social media sleuths have estimated that Wuhan funeral homes had returned 3,500 urns a day since March 23. That would imply a death toll in Wuhan of about 42,000 — or 16 times the official number. Another widely shared calculation, based on Wuhan’s 84 furnaces running nonstop and each cremation taking an hour, put the death toll at 46,800.
U.S. intelligence officials told Bloomberg News at the start of the month that China intentionally did not report the true numbers of their coronavirus outbreak.
Last month, The Daily Mail reported that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been briefed that China had significantly under-reported the real numbers of both cases and deaths.
The Daily Mail reported:
Mr Johnson has been warned by scientific advisers that China’s officially declared statistics on the number of cases of coronavirus could be ‘downplayed by a factor of 15 to 40 times’. And No 10 believes China is seeking to build its economic power during the pandemic with ‘predatory offers of help’ countries around the world.A major review of British foreign policy has been shelved due to the Covid-19 outbreak and will not report until the impact of the virus can be assessed. A Government source close to the review said: ‘It is going to be back to the diplomatic drawing board after this. Rethink is an understatement.’
A “conservative estimation” this week from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) estimated that even when given every benefit of the doubt possible, China significantly under-reported the number of cases that it had.
“The estimate from AEI resident scholar Derek Scissors, PhD, was included in an article published Monday night in The Wall Street Journal,” The Daily Wire reported. “The estimate found that China had at a minimum 2.9 million coronavirus cases ‘outside Hubei,’ which is the province that Wuhan is located in. Scissors used travel data that was published with the approval of the Chinese Communist Party and then lowered those numbers even further just to give China the benefit of the doubt.”
Scissors wrote:
A natural reaction to figures in the low millions: China is plainly lying but not by nearly that much, because the Communist Party cannot hide 2-3 million cases. Yes, it can. Flu illnesses in the US neared 20 million before the end of January—before COVID-19 was widespread here, with two months left of flu season, and at less than one-fourth China’s population. Chinese respiratory illnesses of all kinds could easily exceed 100 million, hiding 2.9 million COVID-19 cases. …Mortality remains sadly unsettled, but China’s size would obscure even a high rate. Hubei’s COVID-19 mortality should be quite high, due to the obvious inability to prepare and being initially overwhelmed. It is 4.7 percent. If extended over the rest of China—which is thankfully an exaggeration—that would produce 136,000 deaths over what is now more than three months. In a typical three-month period in ex-Hubei China before COVID-19, nearly 2.5 million people died. Even that many deaths would be easily obscured.
In his concluding remarks, Scissors wrote: “It is the party’s intent that no estimate of Chines COVID-19 cases can be entirely convincing. Getting to 2.9 million cases starts with information offered by state media, uses the lowest available infection rate, applies days in circulation with a deliberately reduced figure to reflect a superior Chinese virus response, then stirs in the 1.39 billion people. Or you can believe that 1.2 million travelers from ground zero of a pandemic, some freely circulating for weeks, resulted in national contagion of a little over 15,000 cases.”
#UPDATE Wuhan raises COVID-19 death toll by 1,290, up 50%: Chinese government
#UPDATE Wuhan, China's #coronavirus ground-zero, has abruptly raised its death toll by 50% to a total of 3,869, admitting many cases were "mistakenly reported" or missed.@AFP's Hector Retamal photographed crowds waiting for attention at a hospital in Wuhan on January 25
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