After China abruptly raised its death toll by 50 percent, while admitting that many fatal cases were “mistakenly reported” or missed entirely, the WHO said on Friday, that many countries are likely to follow China in revising up their death counts once they start getting the coronavirus crisis under control.
The WHO came out in defence of China and said that Wuhan had been so overwhelmed by the COVID-19 outbreak which emerged in the city in December to ensure every death and infection was properly recorded.
Wuhan city administration, which remained the epi-centre of Coronavirus outbreak for a long time took to social media yesterday and posted that it had added 1,290 deaths to the tally in the city, where the global pandemic emerged and which has suffered the vast majority of China’s fatalities from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Chinese authorities initially tried to cover up the outbreak, punishing doctors who had raised the alarm online, and there have been questions about the government’s recording of infections as it repeatedly changed its counting criteria at the peak of the crisis.
Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead while talking to journalists at a virtual press conference in Geneva said, “This is something that is a challenge in an ongoing outbreak: to identify all of your cases and all of your deaths.”
She said the Wuhan authorities had now reviewed their databases and cross-checked for discrepancies.
“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?, “said Kerkhove.
By raising the total to 3,869, and adding a further 325 cases, bringing the number of infections to 50,333, this data change has raised the nationwide death toll of China up by nearly 39 per cent to 4,632, based on official national data released earlier on Friday.
Van Kerkhove said that because Wuhan’s healthcare system was swamped, some patients died at home; others were in makeshift facilities; and that medics, focused on treating patients, therefore did not do the paperwork on time.
Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director, added: “All countries will face this”.
But he urged nations to produce precise data as early as possible, “because that keeps us on top of what the impact is, and allows us to project forward in a much more accurate way.”
The United States (US) led Western nations and organisations have raised doubts about China’s transparency. It has come under increasing pressure over the coronavirus pandemic from worldwide criticism. The US is probing whether the virus actually originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
China has meanwhile maintained that the COVID-19 virus emerged from a Wuhan food market whose merchandise reportedly included exotic wild animals sold for human consumption.
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.
Meanwhile, in rest of the world facing the coronavirus outbreak, in the African continent more than two million people have been infected with COVID-19. According to tally prepared by news agency AFP, more than 145,000 people have lost their lives.
United States followed by Europe are the worst sufferers of the pandemic. with most number of cases so far been reported from these places.
But WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned of a “worrying trend” emerging in Africa.
At the WHO’s last daily count, there had been 11,843 confirmed cases and 550 deaths on the continent.
“In the past week there has been a 51 percent increase in the number of reported cases in my own continent, Africa, and a 60 percent increase in the number of reported deaths,” AFP quoted former Ethiopian health minister as saying.
But his colleagues said the situation was not beyond control on the continent, given Africa’s long experience of having to battle fatal disease outbreaks.
“We don’t believe, at this point, the disease has passed the capacity to be contained,” said Ryan.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, the wet-markets in China have been in the spotlight as much as the virus itself, with some blaming them as the source of coronavirus. These markets are the venue to buy fresh meat, vegetables and fish across Asia, with slight variation in each country in the operating modalities. The common, everyday produce is being sold to locals at affordable prices, with some selling live animals, and sometimes wildlife in some countries.
WHO chief Tedros said they were an important source of food and work for millions, but they were too often poorly regulated and maintained.
“WHO’s position is that when these markets are allowed to reopen, it should only be on the condition that they conform to stringent food safety and hygiene standards,” he said.
“Governments must rigorously enforce bans on the sale and trade of wildlife for food.”
An estimated 70 percent of all new viruses in humans come from other species, he added.
(With agency inputs)