Can the country of billions really have less than 5,000 COVID-19 deaths?
At the time of this writing, the US has experienced over 80,000 coronavirus deaths.
In Wuhan, China, the proposed origin of the coronavirus, officials are now reporting there are no new cases of the virus, and no additional deaths being attributed to the disease in the province of Hubei. (This is where Wuhan is situated).
Astoundingly, the massive country of 1.3 billion people has officially reported just 4,633 coronavirus deaths and 83,000 total cases of the infection.
Can the numbers in China really be so low? They pale in comparison with those of other countries. Just about every country has made a mistake someplace along the line in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. No one is perfect, that is for sure. But get this. Canada, for example, has implemented relatively strict stay-at-home recommendations for its citizens since mid-March. The country has gone so far as to close all non-essential businesses for months. With a population of 37 million, this neighbor to the US now has 4,693 coronavirus deaths reported. That is about 60 more reported coronavirus deaths than the Asian superpower, which has millions more inhabitants.
I’ll state it again: Canada now has more official COVID-19 deaths than bustling, jam-packed China.
Can China possibly be telling the truth? Are its coronavirus case numbers and deaths that astronomically low, per capita?
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Here is some of what we know. According to TIME, at of the beginning of April 2020, only those patients who died after first being diagnosed with COVID-19 were being included in China’s official coronavirus death statistics. This is similar to what has happened in other countries, however, TIME reports that at least in Wuhan, people were seen collapsing in the street, presumably succumbing to COVID-19 in public.
Grimly, bodies of the deceased were also being laid out to be taken away outside apartment buildings, reports have stated. So the evidence is there. There were likely countless people who died at home of COVID-19 in China. They never made it to a hospital, and therefore they were never included in the country’s official death count.
And then there is the matter of language. It has also been reported that China changed the definition of what constitutes a COVID-19 infection up to eight times from the beginning of the pandemic, until April 1 2020. This would undoubtedly have made counting official cases a difficult task.
Reports also indicate that initially, only extreme cases of COVID-19 were counted. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post stated there were a total of 42,000 asymptomatic confidential coronavirus cases in China at the conclusion of February. These were not included in official case counts, one study found. So, no one heard about these cases.
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US officials deny China’s totals. They blatantly disagree. Officials in the US have actually gone so far as to say that China downplayed their coronavirus numbers at the beginning of the pandemic in order to be able to stock up on supplies in secrecy. This would include things like face masks and protective medical gear, they would have needed. It is said the country did this in order to be better prepared, and to ensure that other countries did not make a run on these items, causing China to fall short.
Did this really happen? We will never know. What goes on in China seems to stay in China. One thing is for certain though. No country has accurate numbers when it comes to the total number of coronavirus cases in their people. It is likely that no one has proper total COVID-19 death counts, either. But there is no sense in hiding what is happening: we are all at the whim of the virus. We are all trying to beat it. Let’s work together to find a solution. We all need to get back to “normal” in the safest, fairest way possible, and we can do this that much more efficiently when everyone is as transparent as possible.
