China Nearly To 5000 Death Due To COVID-19

China’s wuhan coronavirus ground-zero city of Wuhan on Friday admitted missteps in tallying its death toll, and abruptly raised the count by 50 per cent following growing world doubts about Chinese transparency.

The United States has led the charge in questioning China’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.

4,632

is the total number of deaths due to COVID-19 in China

Wuhan’s epidemic control headquarters said in a social media posting on Friday that it had added 1,290 deaths to the tally in Wuhan, 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 death toll up by nearly 39 per cent 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 Italy and Spain.

China has come under increasing pressure over the coronavirus pandemic from Western powers, with Washington raising doubts about Chinese transparency and probing whether the virus actually originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

“We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Thursday.