Exclusive Report—'Dark Humor': China's COVID-19 Death Toll In Focus | Part 1 | China In Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. China's suppression of data about COVID-19's origins is now public knowledge, but little attention is given to the ongoing concealment of how many people died. In this exclusive report, we look beyond China's official numbers to reveal the rest of the story, and the truth is shocking. Let's zoom in. Beijing is facing its worst COVID outbreak. Around 250 million infected during the first weeks of December. China had reported only 37 deaths caused by COVID-19. We urge China to be fully transparent about what's going on. We do know that we don't know the cases right now. Now the BBC has found evidence of a considerable COVID death toll in China's rural areas. If you visit local crematoriums, there's a lot of people have died. WHO still believes that deaths are heavily underreported from China. The regime's prestige is based upon this idea that they are really good managers of everything that's going on in the country. And if the COVID numbers are not supporting that, well, one way to address that problem is to eliminate the COVID numbers. If you believe the COVID-19 data reported by Chinese authorities, the country's COVID-19 response is a miracle in human history. No one in China has died of COVID-19 since February 23rd, although 90% of the population has been infected. And for three full years, right up to the day Beijing ended its zero COVID-19 policy, China reported just over 5,200 COVID-19 deaths. Since the start of the pandemic, China's COVID-19 death toll stood at less than 90,000, or 600 thousandths of a percent of the country's population. Now, according to official statistics, China's COVID-19 mortality rate is falling at the fastest pace in the world. By February, authorities reported deaths were down to less than 1,000 per week. That's an extremely low mortality rate, just 7 and 10 millions of a percent for the entire country. By the end of February, COVID-19 deaths reported in China fell 100%, all the way down to zero. That's from over 4,000 daily deaths just a month prior. In comparison, COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. peaked at over 2,600 a day in early 2022, and then fell by 46% to about 1,400 a month later. In other words, over the same one month period, China's COVID-19 deaths dropped by more than double the U.S. rate, signaling the steepest drop in COVID-19 deaths worldwide. In response, the Chinese regime was triumphant. In mid-February, the Politburo Standing Committee, Beijing's decision-making organ, met for talks. Officials there said the Communist Party's policies and adjustment of COVID-19 controls since November had been, quote, totally right, and that the public would agree with the conclusion. But if you suspect China's data is misleading, perhaps these reports can shed some light. First, a new wave of the virus exploded in China since at least December 2022, if not earlier. Signs of the surge were everywhere. We spoke to hospital staff, funeral home personnel, and local residents across China about the situation. To protect their identities, we altered some of their voices. We're short on beds now. All beds have been full since the new year, basically every day. For cremation, we don't have space to store bodies. It's all full. Because during this time, the pressure on funeral homes throughout the city is very tense, and we are not allowed to rest now. My friend is doing a funeral service change. People died and some have set up a hall or something. Now the business is booming, all booked. A friend of mine, his dad, said that during this period, a month and a half, he's been to seven memorials. My neighbor told me before the new year that more than 20 people died. That community wasn't big, with only dozens of houses. U.S. data analyst George Calhoun has examined COVID-19 data from China over the past few years, especially the official COVID-19 death toll. So if you have an outbreak that is out of control and breaking down your medical institutions and putting stress on the economy in the way that it has, well, that doesn't support your story. Former U.S. Army officer and microbiologist Sean Lin says in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, the so-called success of its zero COVID-19 approach, marked by severe lockdowns, contact tracing and mass testing, only proves the system's superiority. An incentive. They want to present an image to Chinese people as well, to the whole world, that the Chinese model works, the CCP model. But that claim only works if the numbers add up. The only problem is, can we trust the numbers? The CCP's CDC announced that from December 7th last year to January 8th this year, in the span of just over a month, only 37 people across the country died of COVID-19. Thirty-seven. That's the official figure of COVID-related deaths reported in China after the zero COVID-19 policy ended on December 7th. On January 14th, just a week after the Chinese government announced the zero COVID-19 policy, On January 14th, just a week later, China's health officials announced a big edit, raising the official COVID-19 death toll since last December from 37 to about 60,000. Their kind of like reported number gave people a kind of like impression of jumping around, you know, a sudden jump with no explanation, which does not make any sense. Dr. Mai He is a pathologist at Washington University School of Medicine. Since then, reports of overwhelmed hospitals and overflowing funeral homes have inundated the internet and global media headlines. Eighteen times, at the same time. From six o'clock in the afternoon to now. A whole eight hours. One by one, the stretchers passed by you. The stretchers were lined up with people who died one by one. Look at this car. It was filmed yesterday, not today. It's been a year. What kind of black old man is dying? My close relatives, among them, there are four died already. That is from one family. 37 deaths. That's, you almost think there's a sense of humor, dark humor there to report a number like that. In February, Time magazine quoted Yan Zhonghuang, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for Global Health, as saying, the problem for China is the extent of that undercount, or what causes that undercount. First, you have the strict definition that discourages doctors from reporting COVID-related deaths. Second, you only count those cases when people die in hospitals. In China's COVID-19 data pipeline, there are some seemingly obvious information drop-offs. Until now, China has only counted fatalities in which a scan showed lung damage caused by the virus. So the death wasn't counted if COVID-19 was only a contributing factor. Unlike China's method, the World Health Organization's guideline says deaths in which COVID-19 is a contributing cause must be counted. No country in the world is changing the definition of COVID-19 deaths. It's set by the WHO, followed by all countries. Those excluded in China's data could be a sizable group. As The Economist noted, the virus of COVID-19 elevates deaths of those with other illnesses at alarming rates. Additionally, China's death tally only includes patients who died while in hospitals and who tested for COVID-19. The 60,000 figure means, on average, only six people died of COVID-19 for every 100 hospitals and medical facilities during the peak of the surge. What about the rest? Like those who died at home, and those among the half-billion people in China's rural areas who lack easy access to healthcare facilities. But even those who died in hospitals may not have been certified as COVID-19 deaths. In this video, a patient in Shanghai asked a doctor for a COVID-19 diagnosis certificate. In the case of China, the physicians, the doctors at hospitals, when they have to certify a death certificate, if someone had COVID but they also had diabetes, they're reported as having died of something other than COVID. As of February 23rd, the total official COVID-19 deaths in China since 2019 count up to just over 88,000. 94% of the death toll occurred between last December and this February, about three months. Our investigation to even access that official death toll was clouded by a fog of skewed data. China's National Health Commission suddenly stopped publishing daily COVID-19 infections and deaths near the end of last year. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was still publishing data until earlier this year. Since January, China has reported COVID-19 deaths only a handful of times. In December, the official death count even had one struck off. And on one occasion, data from China's CDC and National Health Commission reflected a near 20-fold discrepancy for COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations. China also has no rolling mechanism to smooth daily fluctuations. Although death rates are charted according to official figures and weekly reports, no specific numbers are given. Without officials providing reliable data, we delved into front-line reports, online postings, statistic models, and spoke to experts from different areas to find out the true toll of China's COVID-19 pandemic. But before we get into that, perhaps you are wondering, why should we even care? The virus came out of China. There's nothing unusual about that. Wuhan, Hubei Province, the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic and the only COVID-19 hotspot in China in 2019. Yet the city's death count was adjusted at the very beginning of the outbreak. By April 2020, the original COVID-19 death toll in the city was set at about 2,500. Then a day later, officials added another 1,000 deaths, said to be the result of failures by hospitals to report numbers correctly. That brought the Wuhan death count up to less than 4,000, where it still stands today. Outside of the city, another 600 deaths were reported in Hubei Province. Beyond Hubei Province, there have been just over 100 COVID-19 deaths reported in all of China over three years, a total of less than 5,000. If that data is to be believed, how did the virus not spread throughout the rest of China? The critical issue is the lack of transparency, consistent lack of transparency. This is a threat to the whole world. A 2021 study by the British Medical Journal found an eight-fold increase in pneumonia deaths in Wuhan compared to the same period in 2019. That's nearly 6,000 more deaths, and nearly three-fifths of them were not attributed to COVID-19 in the original official count. In May 2021, The Economist reanalyzed the same data. That investigation found that the total excess deaths in Wuhan reached more than 13,000. That's triple China's official count and double the British report's estimate. So for these models, these British models, it's always garbage in, garbage out. If you cannot get real data from China, all your estimations will be way off. According to a professor at Johns Hopkins University, people are hungry for data, good data, as he worries that there might be too many models out there. Only when people have the correct information can they make correct judgments. It's very important for us to keep on the, you know, to be on the same page, you know, exchange the critical value, you know, information, so people can take corresponding actions. With good data, researchers can predict how many people will likely get infected with the virus. Governments can implement countermeasures and policies. Health organizations can better understand patients' needs. And the Chinese people can stay informed about the true scale of the calamity descending on their country. That is what China has not allowed to happen from really the first outbreak right on through to today. The destruction of data, the hiding of information, the suppression of reports of all sorts, all of that has put a big cloud of uncertainty over this very critical part of the epidemiological chain. During the earlier pandemic, Time magazine interviewed many sickened Wuhan residents and relatives of presumed COVID-19 victims. They were never included on official death or infection tallies. And just like how China defied WHO guidelines on how to define a COVID-19 death, since the outbreak, China has changed what constitutes a COVID-19 infection in its official statistics at least eight times. It wasn't until the end of March 2020 that Beijing finally included asymptomatic infections in its official reports. In 2020, a U.S. study led by Dr. Mei He on the official outbreak in China's Wuhan estimated 36,000 could have died at the time, ten times the official figure. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had earlier told CNBC that Beijing's actions have set America's prevention efforts back. And the information that we got at the front end of this thing wasn't perfect and has led us now to a place where much of the challenge we face today. That is, if the CCP didn't lie, the loss would be greatly reduced. A study by the British University of Southampton found 95% of COVID-19's global spread could have been reduced if China had come clean with the initial Wuhan outbreak and intervened earlier. It's a big deal if China under-reported Wuhan's mortality data during this period. This would prove two things. First, that Chinese authorities knew that COVID-19 deaths were much higher than reported. Second, that other COVID-19 deaths in China may have been excluded or incorrectly attributed to other causes. Within eight days, I lost five close relatives. The information that we got at the front end of this thing wasn't perfect and has led us now to a place where much of the challenge we face today. It's very important for us to be on the same page. That is what China has not allowed to happen. If you cannot get real data from China, all your estimations will be way off. My close relatives, among them, there are four died already. That is from one family. We calculated how long each furnace burns, and then we came back to make an overall estimate, which is around 380 million. That's all for today's China InFocus on YouTube. We're now sharing a shortened version of our program here after being demonetized for two years. Here's what to look out for in our second half. An advanced made-in-China chip inside Huawei's latest smartphone, raising questions about just how effective Washington's chip ban really is. That's because the Chinese telecom giant can't access 5G chips from overseas or make them itself due to Washington's export controls. What are the main concerns, and what does the news mean for the smartphone market? We sat down with Todd Weaver, CEO and founder of Purism for details. The full episode is available on our partner platform, Epic TV. To sign up, click the link down below. Thanks for watching China InFocus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. See you tomorrow.