There have been over 600,000 cases in the last two months
After downplaying their cases, a leak from one of China’s most secretive universities shows just how hard the country has been hit by COVID-19, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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As China’s communist government continues to stonewall an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, the mystery of just how many cases the country has really experienced may be a step closer to being solved.
Despite having previously claimed to have suffered just 80,000 coronavirus cases and a little over 4,600 deaths – figures no one realistically believed – a virus tracking database leaked from China’s National University of Defence Technology to Foreign Policy magazine contained an astounding 640,000 rows of cases reported in 230 cities from February through April.
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Given that the first officially reported coronavirus case in China was dated back to November 17, the database would suggest that the country has experienced far more than just the 640,000 cases being tracked by the university.
It also further suggests that China has been lying about the true number of cases, particularly given last week’s sudden and unexplained official increase of the death toll in Wuhan by 50 per cent.
In recent weeks social media images out of Wuhan have also shown large numbers of cremation urns being shipped to the city.
Throughout the pandemic China is generally thought to have underplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus’s impacts within its own borders, first hiding and then revealing numbers of asymptomatic cases.
Last month US president Donald Trump said that China’s reports of cases seemed “a little bit on the light side.”
Had China come clean about the nature of the virus and its potential to spread in the early days of the disease, experts believe that its spread could have been stopped before spreading to more than 200 countries around the globe, killing more than 316,000 people thus far and wrecking the global economy.
The news of these potentially far higher figures come as reports emerge that Chinese officials are scrambling to manage another outbreak of the virus in northeast China, which has led to panic buying and increased prices for food and medicine as well as a local officials being sacked for failing to manage the virus.
According to one report, although a handful of cases have been officially announced in the city of Jilin, local authorities are not counting asymptomatic but positive cases, though the local hospital has been locked down with people barred from entering or leaving the hospital.