Toll revised but coverup denied China
China denied covering up the true extent of its coronavirus outbreak yesterday after it revised the death toll sharply upwards amid mounting international calls for an investigation into its culpability for a global health crisis.
Officials in Wuhan, the ground zero of the coronavirus pandemic, admitted there had been mistakes in the original counting of fatalities and revised the death toll to 3869, an increase of 50 per cent. The number of infections was also raised by 325 to 50,333.
The health officials blamed the increase on the failure to record those who died at home when hospitals were overwhelmed, as well as the failure of some of those hospitals to file complete numbers. China’s foreign ministry acknowledged the miscounting as a matter of regret but denied that it had been deliberate. ‘‘There has never been any concealment,’’ Zhao Lijian, the foreign ministry spokesman, said.
Other countries, including Britain, Spain and Italy, have also been forced to revise their death tolls as fatalities prove underreported. Last week it emerged that Britain’s official toll had not included any deaths at home or in care homes.
Wuhan’s revised total, just higher than London’s figure, appeared to come as a response to growing questions about the accuracy of its numbers.
Questions over China’s conduct have been mostly led by United States President Donald Trump and the China hawks in his administration, who blame the country for a disease that is wrecking the US economy during an election year.
Trump’s scepticism was echoed by Dominic Raab, the British foreign secretary, after he stood in for Prime Minister Boris Johnson during a G7 teleconference in which the US president also sought to justify his withdrawal of funding from the World Health Organisation (WHO), claiming that it was too China-centric.
‘‘We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier,’’ Raab said, adding that it could not just be ‘‘business as usual’’ with China until those questions were answered.
This week it was reported that Beijing had sat on news of the outbreak for six days before warning the public, apparently for fear of the economic damage in the buildup to Chinese New Year. More than 3000 people in Wuhan were infected before President Xi Jinping issued his warning. Public health experts say that action taken six days earlier might have been enough to prevent the collapse of Wuhan’s health system. The Times