Amidst China reporting that the number of new deaths from COVID-19 in China had plunged to zero, on Monday an official newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper published news that there could be 10,000 to 20,000 new asymptomatic cases in Wuhan.
That article was quickly deleted online.
In the article in Health Times, Dr. Yang Jiong, director of respiratory medicine at Wuhan’s Zhongnan Hospital, said that a survey in the three days prior to the article estimated 10,000 to 20,000 asymptomatic cases in Wuhan, as The Wall Street Journal reported.
As the Journal reported of Wuhan, “The city has announced only three new confirmed cases with symptoms since March 18. Authorities have just formally ended the 77-day lockdown on the city, allowing inbound and outbound travel for healthy people, after easing some residential restrictions to revive a crippled local economy. In the past few days, however, it has tightened restrictions on some housing complexes, and said others will remain in place, after confirming dozens of new asymptomatic cases.”
The Chinese government, which has denied the charge, has been suspected by the U.S. intelligence community of publishing inaccurate numbers regarding infections and deaths; the Journal noted that Chinese authorities have done so “in part to boost President Xi Jinping’s image.” Numbers of asymptomatic cases of coronavirus (those people who tested positive but had no symptoms) were not published by the Chinese government until April 1.
It is unclear how much of the misleading data has originated with local officials, who are fearful of offending the Chinese government, and how much came from the Chinese Communist government itself. The Journal noted, “Privately, some epidemiologists have expressed worries that officials across China may have been less aggressive about testing in recent weeks to sustain the impression that China had managed to get infection numbers down.
David Hui, professor of respiratory medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s faculty of medicine, told the Journal, “Tough lockdowns in China broke many chains of transmission, but it’s unlikely that all the cases have been stamped out. The evidence is in the number of asymptomatic cases in the community. We have to watch out for a second wave of infections in China.”
The Journal noted that although China said there have been 50,008 confirmed coronavirus cases and 2,571 deaths in China, two studies surmised that those figures likely could be doubled.
China has targeted investigative journalists working for the Journal, among others, since the coronavirus crisis began; as The Daily Wire reported:
On Feb. 18, the Trump administration declared that employees of Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio, China Daily and The People’s Daily, the major Chinese news outlets, were government operatives. On February 19, China announced it was expelling three members of The Wall Street Journal; TIME noted, “Beijing blamed the expulsions on an editorial headline that called China the ‘sick man of Asia,’ but the expelled reporters had also written hard-hitting investigative stories about alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang, where Beijing has been detaining members of the Muslim Uighur minority in camps, and alleged abuses of power by Chinese leaders.”
In mid-March, The New York Times reported that the Chinese government announced that it would revoke the press credentials of American journalists for major news outlets while demanding that the media outlets for which the journalists worked tell the Chinese government what they were doing. The news outlets included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Voice of America and Time magazine.