China's death toll revised
Higher numbers confirm suspicions
China’s official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic jumped sharply yesterday as the hardest-hit city of Wuhan announced a major revision that added nearly 1300 fatalities.
The new figures resulted from an in-depth review of deaths during a response that was chaotic in the early days. They raised the official toll in Wuhan by 50 per cent to 3869 deaths.
While China has yet to update its national totals, the revised numbers push up China’s total to 4632 deaths from a previously reported 3342.
The higher numbers are not a surprise — it is virtually impossible to get an accurate count when health systems are overwhelmed at the height of a crisis — and they confirm suspicions that many more people died than official figures showed.
The undercount stemmed from several factors, according to a notification issued by Wuhan’s coronavirus response headquarters and published by the official Xinhua News Agency.
The reasons included the deaths of people at home because overwhelmed hospitals had no room, mistaken reporting by medical staff focused on saving lives, and deaths at a few medical institutions that weren’t linked to the epidemic information network, it said.
Deaths outside hospitals were not registered previously and some medical institutions reported cases late or not at all, the official said.
A group to review the numbers was established in late March. It looked at data from multiple sources including the city’s hospital and funeral service systems and collected information from fever clinics, temporary hospitals, quarantine sites, prisons and elderly care centers.
The review found 1454 additional deaths, as well as 164 that had been double-counted or misclassified as coronavirus cases, resulting in a net increase of 1290. The number of confirmed cases in the city of 11 million people was revised up slightly to 50,333.
Questions have long swirled around the accuracy of China’s case reporting, with Wuhan in particular going several days in January without reporting new cases or deaths.
That has led to accusations that Chinese officials were seeking to minimise the impact of the outbreak and could have brought it under control sooner.
Chinese officials covering up cases, have denied saying their reports were accurate and timely.
At the start of the outbreak, China proceeded cautiously and largely in secret, emphasising political stability. Experts estimate more than 3000 people were infected before China’s government told the public about the gravity of the situation, which officials had discussed privately six days earlier.
The risk of sustained human-tohuman transmission was also downplayed, even while infected people entered hospitals across the country and the first case outside China was found, in Thailand.