Official data was accidentally published in a province of communist China this week showing that the country has dramatically underreported the true extent of the damage that the coronavirus pandemic has had on its people.
The New York Times reported that the data from the eastern province of Zhejiang was published on a local government website and was later reported on by a Chinese news outlet. Within a couple of days, both reports were deleted.
China has claimed that approximately only 83,700 people have died throughout the course of the entire pandemic across the country. However, the new data showed that in Zhejiang, the province saw a 72,000+ increase in excess deaths during the first quarter of this year alone compared to the same time period last year.
The 70% increase of excess deaths in the province of roughly 65 million people, when extrapolated across the entire country of nearly 1.5 billion people, results in an estimated 1.5 million excess deaths for just the first three months of this year.
China, where the coronavirus pandemic originated in 2019, experienced a coronavirus outbreak so massive late last year that the communist government was forced to end their draconian lockdown measures as nearly the entire country — up to 90% — were infected over the course of just a few months.
The Times previously estimated in February that up to 1.5 million people were killed from China’s latest mass coronavirus wave and, with the accidentally published numbers from China, multiple groups of independent experts agreed that the estimate was likely very accurate.
Those numbers only represent a fraction of the total number of deaths that the country has faced during the course of the pandemic, which originated in Wuhan.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) released a “conservative” estimate in April 2020 of the number of deaths the country had experienced during the first few months of the pandemic.
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The report said that only a few months in, China likely had a minimum of 136,000 deaths from the pandemic.