China hid Covid-19 toll, steep fall in mobile, landline users: Report

The skeletons of coronavirus cases that China hid are apparently tumbling out of the closet. A media report on Wednesday claimed that the Chinese government has deliberately underreported the total number of new coronavirus (Covid-19) cases and deaths in the country.

Citing US intelligence officials, Bloomberg reported that "China's public reporting of Covid-19 infections and deaths is purposefully incomplete".

The US intelligence community has submitted a classified report on this to the White House. "Two of the officials said the report concludes that China's numbers are fake," the Bloomberg report added.

China has reported 82,361 coronavirus cases and 3,305 deaths, while the cases in the US has almost touched 2 lakh, with over 4,000 deaths, according to the data from Johns Hopkins University.

The White House or any Chinese official was yet to comment on the report. There have been murmurs in the world intelligence community of China not disclosing real coronavirus figures, which Beijing has always denied.

Earlier, a Chinese blogger based in New York, Jennifer Zeng, posted the official monthly data released on March 19, showing the number of cellphone users decreased from 1.600957 billion to 1.579927 billion in February 2020. Similarly, the number of landline users reduced from 190.83 million to 189.99 million, a drop of 840,000 last month.

Compared with the data, which was released on December 18, 2019, for November 2019 data, both cellphone and landline users dropped dramatically.

Last year too, for the same month, the number of cell phones had increased by 24.37 million and the number of landline users had gone up by 6.641 million. Zeng insinuated the drop could be due to the closing of accounts due to coronavirus-related deaths.

A US-based independent news media run by American Chinese, The Epoch Times, in a detailed report described how cellphones are an indispensable part of life in China due to very high level of digitization in every sphere of life controlled by the government.

Activities in Hubei province, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus seem to contradict the reported death toll in China.

The seven funeral homes in the city of Wuhan were reported to be burning bodies 24 hours a day, seven days a week in late January. Hubei Province has used 40 mobile crematoria, each capable of burning five tons of medical waste and bodies a day since February 16.

"The Chinese Communist Party's cover-up and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic," the Epoch Times wrote.