Wuhan raises COVID-19 death toll by 50 percent

Beijing/Shanghai

The Chinese city of Wuhan raised its death toll from the novel coronavirus by 50 per cent yesterday, bringing its total to 3,869, amid doubts about the accuracy of China’s data on the disease as global cases mount. The central city where the virus first appeared in humans late last year added another 1,290 fatalities to the 2,579 previously counted as of Thursday, reflecting incorrect reporting, delays and omissions, according to a local government taskforce in charge of controlling the coronavirus.

Reflecting the additional deaths in Wuhan, China revised up its national death toll later on Friday to 4,632. The revision follows widespread speculation that Wuhan’s death toll was significantly higher than reported. Rumours of more victims have for weeks been fuelled by pictures of long queues of family members waiting to collect ashes of cremated relatives and reports of thousands of urns stacked at a funeral home waiting to be filled. Some experts, however, believe fatality numbers in many other countries fail to show the real toll because some people have died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, without being tested or going to hospital, so are not included in coronavirus tallies.

Wuhan’s total number of cases was revised up by 325, suggesting that some of the new deaths had been recorded as cases but not confirmed as fatalities, taking the total number of cases in the city of 11 million people to 50,333, or about 60% of mainland China’s total. Some of those officials acknowledged that people may have died without being counted in the chaotic early days of the outbreak, before testing was widely available. “There couldn’t have been many because that was a very short period,” Wang Xinghuan, head of one of two field hospitals built for the outbreak, told reporters in Wuhan on April 12. He stressed that he was not speaking for the government. China does not include patients with no clinical symptoms such as a cough or a fever in its tally of confirmed cases.

Picture caption : The Wuhan Institute of Virology opened in 2018 with the founder of a French bio-industrial firm, Alain Merieux, acting as a consultant in its construction.