16 Global News Post 1

Global News Post 1

https://globalvoices.org/2023/01/19/from-37-to-60000-chinas-official-covid-19-death-toll-data-remains-opaque/ by Oiwan Lam

[People outside of a funeral home in China] BBC News China. (2022). YouTube. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kacNNLhbr7cj.

This article goes over some interesting facts and figures to show how China is most definitely lying about the number of COVID-19 related deaths since December 8.  China originally said that its COVID related deaths were at 37 cases from early December to early January, and at a total number of 5,421 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic in 2019.  However, just within the past month China changed its number of deaths from 37 to almost 60,000 because of prompting from the World Health Organization saying that China needed to share more data on its COVID-19 outbreak.

The point that the article is really trying to get at is the fact that both the numbers 37 and 60,000 are meaningless in this situation.  Based on the numbers that the Chinese government is giving and the number of hospitals and medical facilities in China, it implies that there have been fewer than two COVID related deaths per hospital over the past month.  The article then dives into numbers and statements from people who are trying to determine the real number of deaths that have occurred in the most recent Chinese COVID outbreak.

This article includes links and posts from many different sources to show what might be a more realistic number.  The article also included a post from Hu Xijin, a top propagandist from the state-funded Global Times.  These posts from different sources are used to highlight how the state has such control in China that it’s hard to get accurate numbers and stats if they don’t want you to.  One of the main ways that this article shows how the numbers the government is giving can’t be correct, is through the use of satellite imagery at Chinese funeral homes.  The posts and stats are all there to give context as to how far off the numbers that the Chinese government came up with are.