Coronavirus stats in China particularly confirmed COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, have been altered, according to state media.
Wuhan, the country's epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, has changed upwards the number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the city due to “a city-wide investigation,” based on CNBC’s translation of a Chinese language report by Xinhua News Agency.
The Wuhan government reported that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the city have been changed to 50,333 as of Thursday. This means there are additional 325 cases, while the cumulative number of deaths has reached 3,869, which is 1,290 more than its previous count.
The notice points out that the increase of patients in the initial phase of the coronavirus outbreak led to a shortage of medical resources and insufficient treatment capacity. This led to patients dying at home.
Second, hospitals were overwhelmed, the notice states. This caused delayed, missing or imprecise reporting of cases and deaths.
Third, some healthcare institutions failed to send timely updates about the cases they were managing because of the vast network of facilities involved in treating infected patients.
Finally, the notice claims that the registration of some deaths was either redundant or misreported.
During the first week of April, the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. provided a statement to CNBC, saying that Beijing “has fully honored its obligation of notification prescribed by the International Health Regulations, and has been updating the statistics of its confirmed and death cases in an open, transparent and responsible manner.”
“The Chinese government has, out of a strong sense of responsibility for its people’s health, taken the most comprehensive and stringent measures to fight the pandemic,” the statement said.
“Slandering and shifting blame cannot help make up for the lost time,” the embassy added, “nor can they conceal some people’s incompetence in the containment efforts or their despicable attempt to put political interests above human life.”
“In this fight, countries are all interconnected, and they can only prevail by solidarity and stronger cooperation,” the embassy said.
US President Donald Trump was asked that week regarding reports showing the discrepancies in China's figures.
“We have not received” any such data, Trump said. However, he added that China’s numbers appeared “to be a little bit on the light side, and I’m being nice when I say that, relative to what we witnessed and what was reported.”
While he expressed doubt over China's reporting before, Trump said “we really don’t know” if China “underreported or reported however they report.”
As China grapples with governance and political issues surrounding its response to the coronavirus outbreak, the country's economy has already felt the pang of the pandemic.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China showed that the first quarter GDP contracted by 6.8% in 2020 from a year ago.
“What is really important was that before March, everybody was expecting China to have a V-shaped recovery because it was actually (about) China supply disruption, but now we are seeing this demand shock,” Bo Zhuang, chief China economist at TS Lombard, told CNBC.
“The internal demand shock was massive. That tells us that after coronavirus, even after the lockdowns have been lifted, people are cautious to consume. Shopping malls are open but they are not consuming, and that is the key.”
