(Minghui.org) Wuhan, where the coronavirus pandemic originated (also called the CCP virus after the Chinese Communist Party, or COVID-19), revised the local death toll by 1,290 to 3,869 (a 50% increase) on April 17, 2020. Even so, mounting evidence indicates that the actual fatalities and number of infections in Wuhan and the rest of China are much higher than officially reported.
One estimate puts the coronavirus deaths in Wuhan at least 45,000, which was inferred from the number of urns that contained ashes of deceased coronavirus patients and were distributed to their surviving family members in recent weeks. Another estimate based on cremation data and independent investigation put the death toll in Wuhan at around 120,000.
An insider said the central government had actually put the number of deaths at around 280,000. Still, the mysterious sharp decline in cell phone users in China (21 million in January and February of this year) may point to an even gloomier picture of casualties.
As part of information control and censorship, numbers can be highly confidential and hard to verify in China. The Chinese director of the National Bureau of Statistics admitted that some “statistics are falsified,” and that “fraud and deception happen from time to time,” according to a report from Financial Times on December 8, 2016.
China has officially reported 82,719 cases of infection and about 4,632 deaths as of April 18, 2020. As the number of coronavirus patients skyrocketed in other countries, many people questioned the credibility of China's data.
Hankou Funeral Home in Wuhan distributed an average of 500 urns of coronavirus patients' ashes every day between March 23 and April 4. That was 6,500 coronavirus deaths (13 days x 500 urns), which already exceeds the reported nationwide fatalities.
There are 7 funeral homes in Wuhan, which would make the total coronavirus deaths at least around 45,500 (6,500 x 7).
Multiple sources have confirmed that Wuhan's crematories had been working non-stop over the past few months. A crematorium staff member said in late February that he has been extremely busy since early January. “Right after we unloaded the bodies from the trucks and piled them up around the furnaces, we are told to go out again to move more bodies,” he wrote.
On February 3, Huang, a Wuchang Funeral Home employee, revealed to Guyu Lab, a Chinese media platform affiliated with Tencent, that from January 26, the second day of Chinese New Year, employees were required to report to work, no exceptions. “We work 24 hours a day. Our four phone lines are operating 24 hours a day, and the staff is exhausted,” Huang said.
Li Zehua, a former host of China Central TV (CCTV), visited Qingshan Funeral Home on February 21 and confirmed Huang’s account of the heavy workload in Wuhan’s crematoriums. Li reported that by the time he left around 11 p.m., the furnaces were still running.
It usually takes one hour for a furnace to cremate one body. Counting the 26 days between January 26 and February 21, and assuming that each of the 74 furnaces (that Wuhan has) worked 24 hours each day, then a total of 46,176 (26 x 24 x 74) bodies could have been cremated.
Li found out that the average number of non-coronavirus-related deaths in Wuhan was 137 per day. Excluding the 3,562 (137 x 26) non-coronavirus-related deaths, the coronavirus deaths during the 26-day period would be 42,614 (46,176 – 3,562), a number on par with the figure of 45,000 derived from the number of urns distributed.
If the death toll was 42,614 in a 26-day period, one may infer that the three-month toll of fatalities in Wuhan would be more than 120,000.
A resident of Wuhan told Sound of Hope Radio that some community members received phone calls from funeral homes, telling them that they had to wait six months before picking up urns due to the heavy workload. From friends who had connections with high-ranking officials, this resident learned that the central government estimated about 280,000 Wuhan residents had died of coronavirus during the first three months of 2020.
There is further evidence pointing to a high death toll in Wuhan and the rest of China.
About 40 mobile furnaces were shipped to Wuhan in mid-February, according to Zhou, a resident of Wuhan. These trucks were labeled “processing trash and animal bodies.” Divided into three sections, “solid crushing, burning, and air purification,” “each of these trucks has a capacity of 30 cubic meters (or 40 cubic yards) and can process 5 tons (about 11,000 pounds) of materials every day. Many patients were blocked [by officials] at home and, upon death, their bodies were processed this way,” said Zhou.
Another Wuhan resident, Chen Yaohui, said he had learned that helpers from other crematories all over China had come to assist, including some from Beijing. “Some of them also help with the mobile furnaces,” he explained. “They work very hard, day and night.”
Information received by Minghui in mid-February indicated that many textile manufactures in China stopped accepting new orders for items such as clothing or face masks. Instead, they were busy producing body bags for corpses. One plant was instructed by government officials to produce one million body bags.
According to data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information on March 19, the three leading cell phone carriers (China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom) lost a total of 21 million cell phone users between January and February 2020.
Based on monthly reports from these companies published on the Hong Kong stock exchange, reduction in cell phone users was 8.1 million for China Mobile, 7.8 million for China Unicom, and 5.2 million for China Telecom. Nowadays in China, cell phones are needed for everything, including verifying government-mandated health codes, paying bills, and shopping. It is puzzling to see the sudden sharp drop in the number of cell phone users.
Fang Fang, a writer from Wuhan, described the following in her diary on February 13. “What broke my heart further was a picture sent over from a doctor friend,” she wrote. “On the floor inside the crematorium there are cell phones dumped everywhere — their owners, already burned to ashes, have abandoned them forever.”
If the above is true, how did China manage to achieve a near-zero level of new locally transmitted cases in recent weeks? As numerous people were forced to stay at home during the lockdown, many infection cases and deaths at home were uncounted. There is also evidence that many hospital deaths were recategorized as other illnesses or accidents.
A report received by Minghui.org in early April described this scenario: Zheng, a doctor who works in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a certain hospital in Hubei Province, said it was common to label coronavirus patients as other illnesses. “There are still patients being treated, but officially we have zero coronavirus patients,” he said.
Over a dozen seriously ill patients had been admitted to the ICU. To align with higher officials’ claim of a “low death rate and high recovery rate,” only five of Dr. Zheng's ICU patients were reported as coronavirus patients and were “discharged upon recovery.” Later that day, those same patients were readmitted as having strokes, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses.
Nearly 400 confirmed cases had been treated at his hospital and the number of suspected cases remains unknown, Zheng explained. There were times when all 12 wards of the hospital were used for isolation. Among these discharged patients, 20 of them tested positive again even after testing negative twice.
Situations like these not only happen in the hospital where Zheng works or only in Wuhan City, but also in other places across China. On March 12, 2020, Heilongjiang Province reported zero new coronavirus cases. A staff member from Qiqihar First Hospital disclosed that more than 200 staff members in the hospital alone had been infected with coronavirus two weeks before. In particular, nearly everyone in the orthopedics and clinical lab departments was infected. But the information was blocked from the public.
“China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials,” reported Bloomberg on April 1, 2020, in an article titled “China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says.”
The article cited a statement by Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, “The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false. Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.”
A recent Op Ed piece in the March 12 New York Times observed, “Pandemics induce a feeling of enervating fatalism. People realize how little they control their lives.”
As the CCP covered up the disease, its members have also become victims and found themselves having no control over their lives, despite the CCP's indoctrination that communism is able to defy heaven and earth and place people in charge of their own destiny.
A document leaked from one government agency showed that 88% of its employees who died of coronavirus in February were CCP members.
“The CCP organization is highly risky,” wrote netizen Mocha, “better stay away from it.”