Amid growing global doubts about Chinese transparency, with many accusing that the government had concealed the extent of the epidemic, China’s Wuhan on Friday saw a raise of 50 percent in coronavirus death toll.
Officials placed the new tally at 3,869 deaths from the coronavirus in the central Chinese city, an increase of 1,290 from the previous figure.
Wuhan, where the global pandemic emerged, suffered the vast majority of China’s fatalities from COVID-19.
The change also pushes the nationwide death toll up by nearly 39 percent to 4,632, based on official national data released earlier on Friday.
Following the trend, the World Health Organization said Friday that many countries would likely follow China in revising up their death counts once they start getting the coronavirus crisis under control.
“This is something that is a challenge in an ongoing outbreak: to identify all of your cases and all of your deaths,” Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, told a virtual press conference in Geneva.
“I would anticipate that many countries are going to be in a similar situation where they will have to go back and review records and look to see: did we capture all of them?”
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.