The city where the outbreak began has long faced scepticism around its count and the revised figure now makes it the deadliest city in China
Funeral home workers remove the body of a person suspected to have died from coronavirus in early February Amid continuing scepticism around Chinese data on Covid-19, Wuhan raised its official number of fatalities by 1,290 – with state media suggesting that the undercount was due to ‘insufficient’ admission capabilities at ‘overwhelmed’ medical facilities. It blamed ‘a few medical institutions’ and ‘overloaded hospitals’.
That means the city’s new death toll, of 3,869, is the most in China. The number of total cases in the city – which has a population of 11 million – was also raised by 325, to 50,333, accounting for about two thirds of China’s total 82,367 announced cases. The official Xinhua News Agency quoted an unidentified official in Wuhan’s epidemic and prevention and control headquarters as saying ‘mistaken reporting occurred’ during the outbreak. They explained: ‘due to the insufficiency in admission and treatment capability, a few medical institutions failed to connect with the disease prevention and control system in time, while hospitals were overloaded and medics were overwhelmed with patients.
A woman who recovered from Covid-19 is disinfected by volunteers as she arrives at a hotel for a 14-day quarantine earlier in the outbreak ‘As a result, belated, missed and mistaken reporting occurred.’It comes after major scepticism about China’s reporting of case numbers, with questions repeatedly being raised from various organisations in different nations about the reliability of the country’s data.
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