China ups Wuhan COVID-19 death toll by 50%

Health authorities in Wuhan said Friday that at least 50% more people had died from coronavirus in the Chinese city than previously disclosed.

Global leaders, including US President Donald Trump, have questioned the accuracy of Chinese reporting on infection figures. However, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian denied that there had been a cover-up, as the government "did not allow cover-ups."

The figures in detail

• The official death toll in the city increased from 2,579 to 3,869 .
• Authorities also raised numbers of total cases by 325 to 50,333 in the city of 11 million. 
• The revised figures took China's official death toll to 4,632, up from 3,342 according to a National Health Commission announcement.

Wuhan was the epicenter of the pandemic, with the first cases officially emerging from a food market in the city in December.

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What were the reasons given for the disparity?

Zhao told reporters that the revision was the result of a statistical verification to ensure accuracy and that revision is a common international practice.

The government of Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, said the number had been revised due to late reports from medical institutions. It also said some patients died at home due to overloaded hospitals.

"In the early stage, due to limited hospital capacity and the shortage of medical staff, a few medical institutions failed to connect with local disease control and prevention systems in a timely manner, which resulted in delayed reporting of confirmed cases and some failures to count patients accurately," state broadcaster CGTN quoted an unidentified Wuhan official as saying.

The United States, which has a population four times smaller than China and had a delayed start to the outbreak has already suffered at least 33,000 deaths. Italy, with a population 20 times smaller than China, has had 22,000 deaths so far.

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Calls for transparency

The overall accuracy of China's coronavirus data has been questioned both abroad and by the country’s own citizens. Global leaders have called on China to be fully transparent.

Before the recount, US President Donald Trump said: "Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China, and that they have a certain number of cases and a certain number of deaths; does anybody really believe that?"

French President Emmanuel Macron told the Financial Times it was "naive" to think China had handled the pandemic well, adding: "There are clearly things that have happened that we don't know about."

Read more: Did China's authoritarianism actually help the coronavirus spread?

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Thursday: "We'll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn't have been stopped earlier."

aw/rt (AP, Reuters, dpa, AFP)

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