Commentary on Political Economy

Friday 17 April 2020

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Coronavirus: China admits 50 per cent more died in Wuhan

Funeral home workers remove the body of a person suspected to have died from the coronavirus outbreak from a residential building in Wuhan back in February.
Funeral home workers remove the body of a person suspected to have died from the coronavirus outbreak from a residential building in Wuhan back in February.
China has denied covering up the true extent of its coronavirus outbreak after it revised the death toll sharply upwards amid mounting international calls for an investigation into its culpability for a global health crisis.
Officials in Wuhan, the ground zero of the coronavirus pandemic, admitted there had been mistakes in the original counting of fatalities and revised the death toll to 3,869, an increase of 50 per cent. The number of infections was also raised by 325 to 50,333.
The health officials blamed the increase on the failure to record those who died at home when hospitals were overwhelmed, as well as the failure of some of those hospitals to file complete numbers.

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China’s foreign ministry acknowledged the miscounting as a matter of regret but denied that it had been deliberate. “There has never been any concealment,” Zhao Lijian, the foreign ministry spokesman, said. “We will never allow any concealment.”
Other countries, including Britain, Spain and Italy, have also been forced to revise their death tolls as fatalities prove under-reported. Last week it emerged that Britain’s official toll had not included any deaths at home or in care homes.
Wuhan’s revised total, just higher than London’s figure, appeared to come as a response to growing questions about the accuracy of its numbers and allegations that China concealed the extent of the outbreak from its own people and the outside world.
A man jumps into the Yangtze river in Wuhan, China's central Hubei province on April 16. China says it has largely brought the coronavirus under control within its borders.
A man jumps into the Yangtze river in Wuhan, China's central Hubei province on April 16. China says it has largely brought the coronavirus under control within its borders.
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The state-run Global Times said that “it is hoped the veracity of the data can put all controversy surrounding it to rest”.
That is unlikely. Questions over China’s conduct have been mostly led by President Trump and the China hawks in his administration, who blame the country for a disease that is wrecking the US economy in an election year. The CIA told the White House that it was certain that Beijing was undercounting but that it did not know to what extent.
“Do you think you’re getting honest numbers from some of these countries?” Mr Trump asked on Wednesday. “Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China? Does anyone really believe that?”
Mr Trump’s scepticism was echoed by Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, after he stood in for Boris Johnson during a G7 teleconference in which the US president also sought to justify his withdrawal of funding from the World Health Organisation (WHO), claiming that it was too China-centric.
“We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier,” Mr Raab said, adding that it could not just be “business as usual” with China until those questions were answered.
President Macron of France said that it would be “naive” to think that China had handled the crisis well and suggested that the truth was still to be uncovered.
“There are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about,” he told the Financial Times.
Wuhan’s disclosures came as Beijing revealed that the country’s economy had shrunk for the first time in more than four decades, ending its uninterrupted run of growth.
The National Bureau of Statistics said that gross domestic product plunged 6.8 per cent year on year in the first quarter, a dramatic foreshadowing of the depth of economic damage yet to be felt around the globe.
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This week it was reported that Beijing had sat on news of the outbreak for six days before warning the public, apparently for fear of the economic damage in the build-up to Chinese New Year. More than 3,000 people in Wuhan were infected before President Xi issued his warning. Public health experts say that action taken six days earlier might have been enough to prevent the collapse of Wuhan’s health system.
Industry is creeping back to life in Wuhan after the official end of a 76-day total lockdown, aided by the same antibody testing that British ministers hope may help to get people back to work in the UK. The accuracy of the tests is not clear; Britain bought 3.5 million tests from China only to find that they did not work.
Initial testing in Wuhan, however, indicates that the proportion of people with coronavirus antibodies is significantly higher than the total number of confirmed cases, suggesting that many people were infected without knowing or suffering any symptoms, and now have immunity. That proportion, however, was still far short of levels that could provide so-called herd immunity, 50 per cent by some calculations and much higher by others.
Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan found that only 2.4 per cent of its workers and less than 3 per cent of recent patients and visitors had developed antibodies. “This is a long way from herd immunity,” Wang Xinghuan, the head of the hospital, told the Wall Street Journal. “A vaccine may be our last hope.”

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