China, so far, has tried to hold back all information on Coronavirus. The country has reported less than a lakh cases and only 3,300 deaths from the virus that originated from Wuhan and caused a full blown pandemic, which the world, especially the western nations, are finding hard to deal with.
Being the origin of the virus, China is very little affected from the virus, if one goes by the official numbers. But, there are few takers of China’s official numbers, as one report after another expose that the Communist government is underreporting not just the number of cases but deaths, too.
The latest report to bust the Chinese numbers is from New Tang Dynasty Television, which quoted an industrialist, who argued that China has ordered a large number of body bags, a non-porous bag designed to contain a human body, especially in cases of viral diseases like Covid-19.
China orders 200,000 body bags from Taiwan; Panic-buying erupts across China amid #CCPvirus (#coronavirus) #pandemic
Watch full video on @ChinaInFocusNTD: https://t.co/L5ZEoVBQZk
Subscribe: https://t.co/U6sUIz8VgD pic.twitter.com/heSPK3p8QQ— China in Focus – NTD (@ChinaInFocusNTD) April 4, 2020
As per the report, China has ordered 2 lakh body bags from Taiwan, according to a Taiwanese funeral home director. The director claims the last time he received such a huge order was after the South China Sea Tsunami.
However, the real question is that- what China will do with 2 lakh body bags if it has less than 1 lakh cases and just 3,300 deaths. That again reveals that China is lying about the exact number of infected people as well as patient to mortality ratio.
As per Chinese data, the mortality rate from Coronavirus is less than 2 percent as only 3,300 of the 83,000 infected people have died. But, death rate in many countries of Western Europe, like the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain has been around double digits. This means China has also underreported death rates and this caused massive damage as other countries did not took disease seriously, given low death rates.
However, as per media reports, the death rate in China was much higher and possibly 40,000 people died in Wuhan- the city from where the virus originated- alone. As per a report by an investigative media outlet, “Wuhan has seven other mortuaries. If they are all sticking to the same schedule, this adds up to more than 40,000 urns being distributed in the city over the next 10 days.”
Many people who died in the last few months have Covid-19 symptoms, but were not tested for the virus. But the cremations rose exponentially in the last few months. As per a report by Bloomberg, “There were 56,007 cremations in Wuhan in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to data from the city’s civil affairs agency. The number of cremations was 1,583 higher than those in the fourth quarter of 2018 and 2,231 higher than the fourth quarter of 2017.”
The purchase of Urns and body bags reveal that the number of infected as well as that of dead is much higher than reported by Communist government. In the Modern world of networked technologies and supply chains, to which China itself is a big part, no country, organizations, or government could suppress the real numbers. As these numbers would be revealed to people in one or other way, and no amount of official propaganda or the billions of dollars could suppress the information in ‘information age’.
Dead bodies lying unclaimed at the aisles of Wuhan hospitals are a common scene as China finds itself short of manpower. There is palpable anger in China as the authorities ignored the initial signs of outbreak and now the outbreak is proving to be too big for them to handle. There is little doubt that China is hiding the number of deaths and infections. No one is convinced with the extremely low figures of infection and death reported by China and the dead bodies, long queues of loved ones, urns, and body bags prove this.
