- Researchers said more than 35,000 people could have died in Wuhan alone
- China has recorded 4,634 Covid-19 deaths despite being pandemic ground zero
- A study found crematoriums upgraded from working four hours a day to 24/7
- Enough urns were shipped to Wuhan to cope with all of China’s Covid-19 victims
By Sam Blanchard Senior Health Reporter For Mailonline, Updated: 14:15 BST, 17 June 2020
China‘s real coronavirus death toll could be 14 times higher than official statistics show, a study has claimed.
US researchers suggest China covered up the true size of its epidemic and used the activity of crematoriums in Wuhan to try and calculate accurate numbers.
They found the city — which is where the pandemic began in December — may have been burning between 800 and 2,000 bodies every day by the second week of February, when the official death toll for the whole of China was only around 700.
Reports of 86 Wuhan crematoriums operating 24 hours a day at full capacity raises suspicion that the number of people dying was more than just hundreds, they said.
Funeral homes were also buying thousands of urns for ashes and the study suggests that, by March 23 — when the UK went into lockdown — around 36,000 people had died in Wuhan alone. The official number for all China at the time was 2,524.
Beijing says there have now been 4,634 deaths from Covid-19 and 83,265 diagnosed cases. Figures show 98 per cent of recorded coronavirus fatalities have occurred in Hubei province, which Wuhan is the capital of.
The study adds to claims that China has not been transparent about exactly how bad the Covid-19 outbreak was there, which experts say influenced other countries.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has been criticised for not pressing Chinese officials hard enough about the accuracy of their data.
Fresh concerns emerged this week now that there are reports of a second Covid-19 wave in Beijing, with one expert suggesting China will not be straight about this one, either.
The study of crematorium operations in Wuhan was done by experts at the University of Washington, Ohio State University and US communications company AT&T.
It was led by Dr Mai He, a pathologist at Washington, and was based mostly on media reports rather than scientific data.
The study – published on medRxiv – has not been reviewed by other scientists or published in a peer-reviewed journal, meaning experts haven’t pointed out flaws in the methodology for Dr He and colleagues to amend.
The team wrote: ‘The estimates of cumulative deaths, based on both funeral urns distribution and continuous full capacity operation of cremation services up to March 23, 2020, give results around 36,000, more than 10 times the official death toll of 2,524.
‘Our study indicates a significant under-reporting in Chinese official data on the Covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan in early February, the critical time for response to the Covid-19 pandemic.’