New cremation statistics reportedly from inside Wuhan combined with photos of thousands of urns delivered to funeral homes is fueling speculation about the true scale of the coronavirus outbreak in communist China.
Bloomberg News reported:
Outside one funeral home, trucks shipped in about 2,500 urns on both Wednesday and Thursday, according to Chinese media outlet Caixin. Another picture published by Caixin showed 3,500 urns stacked on the ground inside. It’s unclear how many of the urns had been filled.
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There were 56,007 cremations in Wuhan in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to data from the city’s civil affairs agency. The number of cremations was 1,583 higher than those in the fourth quarter of 2018 and 2,231 higher than the fourth quarter of 2017.
Bloomberg News added that skepticism about the true extent of the outbreak in China has been fueled by a variety of factors, including China’s “attempts to cover up the outbreak,” revisions to how cases were counted, and Beijing’s propaganda campaign that falsely claimed that the U.S. military brought the virus to Wuhan.
The Atlantic reported:
The evidence of China’s deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is a matter of public record. In suppressing information about the virus, doing little to contain it, and allowing it to spread unchecked in the crucial early days and weeks, the regime imperiled not only its own country and its own citizens but also the more than 100 nations now facing their own potentially devastating outbreaks. More perniciously, the Chinese government censored and detained those brave doctors and whistleblowers who attempted to sound the alarm and warn their fellow citizens when they understood the gravity of what was to come.
“Many people who died had Covid-19 symptoms, but weren’t tested and excluded from the official case tally, Caixin said,” Bloomberg News added. “There were also patients who died of other diseases due to a lack of proper treatment when hospitals were overwhelmed dealing with those who had the coronavirus.”
Bloomberg News added that employees who picked up the phone at six out of the eight funeral homes in Wuhan did not give out any numbers. The other two funeral homes did not answer the phone.
The news comes as a Johns Hopkins website that tracks the outbreak of the coronavirus indicated late on Saturday that over 660,000 people have been infected worldwide and nearly 31,000 have died. The true number of cases and deaths is likely higher, especially in countries like Iran.
Others have pointed to a drop off in millions of cellphone users in China as evidence that the outbreak was greater than reported. However, a separate report from Bloomberg News cautioned that the massive drop off “could be caused by migrant workers – who often have one subscription for where they work and another for their home region – canceling their work-region account after the virus prevented them from returning to work after the Lunar New Year holidays that began in late January, said Chris Lane, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.”
Communist China also has a track record of giving false numbers on virus outbreaks in the country.
The New York Times reported on the SARS outbreak in April 2003:
In a rare public admission of failure, if not deception, the Chinese government disclosed today that cases of a dangerous new respiratory disease were many times higher than previously reported, and stripped two top officials of their power.
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Admitting to the existence of more than 200 previously undisclosed SARS patients in military hospitals, the official, Deputy Health Minister Gao Qiang, said that as of Friday Beijing had 339 confirmed cases of SARS and an additional 402 suspected cases.
Ten days ago, Health Minister Zhang Wenkang said there were only 22 confirmed SARS cases in Beijing. Last Wednesday, the World Health Organization caused a stir here by estimating that there could be as many as 100 to 200 cases.