China says Wuhan coronavirus death toll 50 per cent higher than previously reported
The Chinese city Wuhan which was at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak today upped its official death toll from coronavirus by 50 per cent to 3,869, state TV reported.
The city where the novel coronavirus first infected humans added another 1,290 victims on top of the 2,570 previously counted, which reflected delays, omissions and incorrect reporting, state TV said.
The revisions follow widespread speculation that Wuhan’s death toll was much higher than acknowledged, with reports of long queues of family members waiting to collect ashes from mortuaries and thousands of empty urns delivered to funeral homes.
“In the early stage, due to limited hospital capacity and the shortage of medical staff, a few medical institutions failed to connect with local disease control and prevention systems in a timely manner, which resulted in delayed reporting of confirmed cases and some failures to count patients accurately,” state broadcaster CGTN quoted an unidentified Wuhan official as saying.
US President Trump on Wednesday questioned China’s official death toll figures.
“Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China, and that they have a certain number of cases and a certain number of deaths; does anybody really believe that?” he said.
The number of total cases in Wuhan, a city of 11m, was revised up by 325, taking the total to 50,333 or about 60 per cent of mainland China’s total.
Doctors and government officials in Wuhan have been repeatedly questioned about the accuracy of the death toll by journalists on government-arranged trips.
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 12 April.
Before the revised Wuhan numbers were released, China said it had recorded 26 new coronavirus cases on the mainland yesterday, down from 46 cases a day earlier, according to the National Health Commission.
It brought the total number of cases in mainland China to 82,367.
No new deaths were reported.