China’s ‘Unrealistic’ Coronavirus Death Toll Discussion Intensifies; Global Figures Support the Accusation

China has been at the receiving end of the criticism by the U.S. government for under-reporting the number of people who have succumbed to COVID-19 in the country. Recently, China announced the fresh and re-calculated death toll in Wuhan, which turned out to be 50 percent greater than the official numbers reported earlier.

President Donald Trump has clearly mentioned several times to the medical that China may have to ‘bear the consequences’ if it is confirmed that the ‘Wuhan’ coronavirus was accidentally leaked into the public from a lab studying coronaviruses in bats. Even though there is no evidence as yet, several countries including Germany, France, and the U.K. believe that China is behind the pandemic that has claimed more than 150,000 lives across the world.

In the U.S., it is not only Trump who thinks that the numbers being reported by China are far less than the actual. The White House coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, thinks the same.

Birx recently showed a graph indicating the mortality rates due to coronavirus in countries around the world. Surprisingly, the country where it all started, is at the bottom of the list.

"I put China on there so you could see how basically unrealistic this could be," Birx said. "When highly-developed health care delivery systems of the United Kingdom and France and Belgium, Italy and Spain with extraordinary doctors and nurses and equipment, have case fatality rates in the 20s and up to 45 in Belgium, which has an extraordinary competent health care delivery system and then China at point-33."

In the chart, Belgium tops the list with 45.2 deaths per 100,000 people. The U.S. is more toward the bottom, with 11.24 deaths per 100,000 people. The same number for Iran is 0.66 and for China, 0.33.

Birx further explained the importance of transparency in dealing with such a global pandemic and went on to say that China should have fulfilled its moral responsibility to share the critical information with the rest of the world when it first reported the case.

Meanwhile, the Chinese economy continues to shrink due to the effects of the pandemic. The country’s fiscal revenue reduced by 26.1 percent in March as compared to last year. The revenue is expected to continue to fall even in the second quarter but the pace of the decline will gradually moderate.