As the world is raising doubts about the China’s transparency in handling the COVID-19 pandemic, Wuhan city, which remained the epi-centre of Coronavirus outbreak for a long time, on Friday abruptly raised its death toll by 50 percent, admitting that many fatal cases were “mistakenly reported” or missed entirely, bringing the total number of deaths in the city to 3,869.
The Wuhan administration took to social media and posted that it had added 1,290 deaths to the tally in the city, where the global pandemic emerged and which has suffered the vast majority of China’s fatalities from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
This change has raised the nationwide death toll up by nearly 39 per cent to 4,632, based on official national data released earlier on Friday.
The United States (US) led Western nations and organisations have raised doubts about China’s transparency. It has come under increasing pressure over the coronavirus pandemic from worldwide criticism. The US is probing whether the virus actually originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
China has meanwhile maintained the COVID-19 virus emerged from a Wuhan food market whose merchandise reportedly included exotic wild animals sold for human consumption.
Wuhan’s epidemic prevention and control headquarters cited several reasons for the missed cases, including the fact that the city’s medical staff were overwhelmed in the early days as infections climbed, leading to “late reporting, omissions or mis-reporting”.
It also cited insufficient testing and treatment facilities, and said some patients died at home and thus their deaths were not properly reported.
(With agency inputs)