The city Wuhan, the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in China has abruptly raised the confirmed number of coronavirus cases and fatalities after “a city-wide investigation,” state media reported.
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The Wuhan government said the total number of confirmed infections in the city have been modified to 50,333 as of Thursday, an increase of 325 cases, while the combined number of fatalities now stands at 3,869 — 1,290 more than its previous count, according to Xinhua News Agency.
Xinhua posted a notice from the Wuhan government, which listed four reasons for the disparity in the city’s data. First, the notice said a rush of patients in the early stage of the pandemic created a deficit of medical resources and inefficiency in the treatment capacity. That resulted in some patients dying at home.
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Additionally, hospitals were submerged with patients, which resulted in delayed, missing or inaccurate reporting of cases and deaths, according to the notice. It also said given the vast network of health-care centers involved in treating patients with the coronavirus, some failed to provide timely updates about the cases they were handling. Finally, registration of some deaths was either repeated or misreported, according to the notice.
Earlier, a recent report by Bloomberg pointed out that China has intentionally under-reported the actual number of Covid-19 cases and deaths, citing a classified report of US intelligence.
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White House officials who spoke anonymously declined to share the details of the report owing to the classified nature of the document but did mention that the essence of the report was that China had underreported the total number of cases and deaths caused by the covid-19 pandemic.
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According to data compiled by John Hopkins University, China has reported 82,000 cases and approximately 3,200 deaths from the pandemic that started in December in 2019 in China’s Hubei province and is far less than the numbers reported by the United States, Spain, and Italy.
