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Shortly after the corona virus outbreak in the metropolis of Wuhan, doubts were raised about China’s statistics on the spread of the pathogen. Now broadcaster CNN is reporting confidential documents that it claims to have available suggesting that Chinese authorities have collected a large amount of data, but only a portion of it has reached the public.
In addition, about 200 “confirmed” and “clinically diagnosed” cases are given in a diagram for 2019. However, as of January 3, 2020, the Chinese authorities reported only 44 cases of “lung disease of unknown origin” to the World Health Organization (WHO). This could have meant that the outbreak was initially underestimated.
According to CNN, experts have verified 117 pages of confidential documents from the health authority in Hubei province, which is also located in Wuhan, to verify their authenticity. The works include information from October 2019 to April 2020.
Definition of problem case
This also shows how much China’s unusual case definition affected official statistics in the first months of 2020. The vast majority of infected and sick people recorded worldwide were still in China at the time.
For example, Hubei official bodies reported on February 10 3,911 newly confirmed cases. 2094 of them are “confirmed”. These are probably people who had symptoms of the new lung disease and tested positive. Furthermore, there are “suspected cases” in 1814.
On the contrary, according to CNN, the internal documents are in total 5918 cases for the day noted, more than 50 percent more than officially declared. These include 2,345 “confirmed cases” and 1,796 “suspected cases.” Another 1,772 people were also “clinically diagnosed” that day, for example with the help of CT scans, but apparently no cases were considered in the official information.
The figures that China officially released were calculated conservatively, said Yanzhong Huang of the Think Tank Council on Foreign Relations. “That reflects how confusing, complex and chaotic the situation was.”
International critic
China’s case definition was also criticized internationally earlier this year. Initially, only those who tested positive and had symptoms were counted as cases. As of February 12, all people with clinical symptoms were briefly considered cases, after which the numbers skyrocketed massively. Then the authorities returned to the first variant.
On March 7, only 83 new cases were publicly reported. According to the internal document, there were 115. Therefore, 32 people with positive test results were not included in the externally reported statistics, probably because they had no symptoms.
Only since the beginning of April has China counted all the people who tested positive as a case (read more here).
There are also significant deviations in the death statistics. On February 17, authorities officially reported 93 Sars-CoV-2-related deaths that day. According to CNN, 196 are mentioned in internal documents.
Testing issues, ill-equipped authority
According to the report, the documents also show that there were massive problems with the tests used in China in the beginning. Repeated sample testing has shown that problems previously classified as negative were largely positive, according to a January document.
In the first months of the outbreak, according to CNN, it took a good 23 days for cases after the onset of symptoms to be included in official statistics. Consequently, internal documents characterize the health authority as insufficiently financed and technically ill-equipped. Employees are unmotivated because they often feel ignored in China’s huge bureaucracy.
“It was clear that China made mistakes, and not just the mistakes that occur when dealing with a new type of virus, but also the bureaucratic and politically motivated ones,” Huang says. But the lack of technology has also caused problems. “Even if China had been 100 percent transparent, that probably wouldn’t have prevented the pandemic.”
WHO group to investigate the origin of the virus
Even in the subsequent course of the pandemic, there was repeated criticism of China’s handling of the virus outbreak. In March, for example, the WHO published a report according to which the country only provided details of the first cases in late 2019 after repeated requests.
Currently, the organization also plans to send experts to the country to search for evidence of the thesis that the virus jumped from wild animals to humans in a Wuhan market. However, so far, the Chinese leadership has not allowed any foreign experts to enter the country.
Instead, official bodies in China are spreading the theory that the virus could have reached Wuhan through frozen food imported from abroad (read more here). However, the Chinese authorities ensure that the pandemic is always managed in a transparent way.
