China: Wuhan's Revised COVID-19 Death Toll Up By 50%, Admits To Missed Cases

The Wuhan municipal headquarters in a notification said the revisions were made in accordance with related laws and regulations as well as the principle of being responsible for history, the people and the deceased.

(Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP)

Wuhan: China's Coronavirus ground-zero city of Wuhan on Friday abruptly raised its death toll by 50 percent to a total of 3,869, revealing that many cases were "mistakenly reported" or missed entirely. Wuhan city, the capital of China's Hubei province where the global Coronavirus pandemic arose last December, on Friday updated the number of deaths caused by the disease in the city, leading to some 50 percent increase in the figures. Efe news reported the revised death toll is 3,869, which is 1,290 more than the 2,579 recorded barely hours earlier by the National Health Commission, which had pegged the number of fatalities for Hubei province to 3,222. The Wuhan authorities have also revised the total number of COVID-19 cases, revealing another 325 previously unreported cases, which took the total number to 50,333, Xinhua news agency reported. The Wuhan municipal headquarters in a notification said the revisions were made in accordance with related laws and regulations as well as the principle of being responsible for history, the people and the deceased. Revealing the reason for the figure revision, the Wuhan municipality stated it was done to ensure that the information on the city’s COVID-19 epidemic is open and transparent and that the data are accurate. Also Watch:  Why China's 'Zoom App' might be a security risk Furthermore, it gave four reasons for the "discrepancies" in the figures. The first reason was that "a surging number of patients at the early stage of the epidemic overwhelmed medical resources and the admission capacity of medical institutions," resulting in some deaths at home without treatment in hospitals. The second reason was that at the peak of the epidemic in the city, "hospitals were operating beyond their capacities and medical staff were preoccupied with saving and treating patients, resulting in belated, missed and mistaken reporting." The third reason given was that due to a rapid increase of assigned hospitals for treating COVID-19 patients - including provincial, municipal, private and makeshift ones - some medical institutions were "not linked to the epidemic information network and failed to report their data in time." The final reason given was "the registered information of some of the deceased patients was incomplete, and there were repetitions and mistakes in the reporting". An official of the headquarters informed the media that a group for epidemic-related big data and epidemiological investigations was established in late March. The official further said he group used information from online systems and collected full information from all epidemic-related locations to ensure that facts about every case are accurate and every figure is objective and correct. "What lies behind epidemic data are the lives and health of the general public, as well as the credibility of the government," said the official, adding that the timely revision of the figures, among other things, shows respect for every single life. (Inputs from IANS)