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A report by Breitbart has revealed that there has been rising skepticism of the numbers of deceased being reported by Chinese Authorities as a result of the coronavirus, as reports from eyewitnesses in Wuhan described numbers drastically higher than the Communist Party is advertising to the world.
The entire of Wuhan was under an intense authoritarian lockdown for months authorities took extreme measures like welding the doors shut of people who had tested positive to keep them from leaving their homes and possibly infecting more people.
In the middle of March, Chinese authorities announced that there were no more new cases of the coronavirus being discovered in Wuhan and businesses started to be allowed to reopen.
Funeral homes allowed thousands of people to pick up the urns supposedly containing their loved ones.
Breitbart reported on the developing questions surrounding the suspect death toll.
Citing funeral home directors and eyewitnesses, multiple reports suggest that the number of urns collected was far larger than that possible if Beijing had accurately reported the number of cases. The Epoch Times, an anti-communist newspaper that has documented skepticism of official government figures from within Wuhan since the onset of the pandemic, estimated over 32,000 deaths attributable to Chinese coronavirus in Wuhan in a report Sunday. The newspaper noted that the urns collected this weekend had amassed between January 23, when the lockdown began, to March 23, when families were first allowed to begin retrieving them.
Citing sources in various Wuhan funeral homes and reports from other outlets such as the independent Chinese media outlet Caixin, the Epoch Times concluded that Wuhan’s seven funeral homes possessed 40,000 urns, each urn containing the remains of one person, during the lockdown, suggesting that 40,000 people died in the city during that time. Discounting the average number of deaths a day in Wuhan in 2018, the latest year for which public statistics are available, the newspaper concluded that at least 32,140 people have died of Chinese coronavirus in Wuhan.
These numbers echoed the warning of funeral directors speaking to the Epoch Times in February, concerned that they did not have the capacity to handle the sheer number of bodies hospitals were sending them. A report in the publication that month found that each Wuhan crematorium was handling as much as five times the normal intake of bodies per day.
China has reported 82,198 total cases of the coronavirus since the outbreak started in November and claim that 3,308 died as a result. The worldwide count of positive cases of the coronavirus is 737,929, and 35,019 have died from complications due to the virus.
