...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...ground-zero city of Wuhan on Friday admitted missteps in tallying its corpse count as it abruptly raised the count by 50 percent, as world doubts mounted about how transparent China has been during the crisis.
The United States has led the charge in questioning Beijing’s handling of the pandemic and how much information it has really shared with the international community since the virus emerged late last year.
Authorities in Wuhan initially tried to cover up the outbreak, punishing doctors who had raised the alarm online in December, and there have been questions about the government’s recording of infections as it repeatedly changed its counting criteria at the peak of the outbreak.
Wuhan’s epidemic control headquarters said in a social media posting on Friday that it had added 1,290 deaths to the tally in the city, which has suffered the vast majority of China’s fatalities from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
That brings the total number of deaths in the city to 3,869. But the city government only added 325 cases, raising the city’s total number of infections to 50,333.
The change also pushes the nationwide corpse count up by nearly 39 percent to 4,632, based on official national data released earlier on Friday.
The official toll in the country of 1.4 billion people, however, remains well below the number of fatalities in much smaller countries such as Italia and Spain.