[World Now] Chinese coronavirus death statistics, can you trust them?

This is the interior of a hospital in northern China, obtained and reported by CNN.

Patients and carers fill the hospital and it looks very chaotic.

Both sides of the hallway were occupied by mobile beds where patients lay, leaving only space for one person to pass.

The warehouse of a funeral home in Liaoning Province is packed with the bodies of the dead who have yet to be buried.

In Jiangsu province, families in mourning clothes filled the doorway of a funeral home.

In Sichuan Province, coffins were lined up to cremate deceased family members, and the video also showed family members standing next to them waiting.

It is a reality that is currently happening in China that rarely appears in official Chinese reports.

▶ Corona 19 deaths “648 people in a week” vs “around 10,000 people a day”

Although reports are pouring in that the number of deaths is rapidly increasing in China, the Chinese authorities are still sticking to the position that there are not many deaths from Corona 19.

World Health Organization (WHO) technical chief Maria van Kerkhove said on the 11th local time, “China has recently provided more information on corona prevention, but the number of deaths is still reducing.”

WHO has not received any quarantine-related information, such as the number of new hospitalizations, from Chinese health authorities since early December of last year when China decided to release its ‘zero corona’ policy.

Then, from December 26 of last year to January 1 of this year, we recently obtained the weekly status of new corona19 confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

On this day, when Chief Kerkhoff mentioned that he was “receiving more information” from China, it seems that he was referring to the situation in which China shared weekly status, which had not been provided for a while.

However, it has been pointed out that the number of deaths, which is an important piece of information that can gauge the seriousness of Corona 19, is far from the truth.

China has reported only 648 deaths from COVID-19 in this week’s statistics.

On the other hand, Airfinity, a British medical data analysis company, recently estimated that the number of deaths from Corona 19 in China is around 10,000 per day.

The WHO sees this as a result of China’s tally method, which defines COVID-19-related deaths too narrowly.

When defining COVID-19 deaths, China limits those who tested positive for COVID-19 to deaths from respiratory failure, which results in the number of deaths from COVID-19 being very low.