A Chinese company, Tencent, may have accidentally leaked real data on coronavirus deaths.
Last week the company seems to have inadvertently released the number of infections and deaths caused by the coronavirus, which were astronomically higher than official figures, says a report in Taiwan News.
Taiwan News reports that on February 1st, Tencent webpage showed confirmed cases of the Wuhan virus in China as standing at 154,023, 10 times the official figure at the time.
It has listed the number of suspected cases as 79,808, four times the official figure.
The number of cured cases was only 269, well below the official number that day of 300. Most ominously, the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day.
The same new report says the netizens of Taiwan were reporting that Tencent was briefly showing data on the novel coronavirus in China on its webpage titled “Epidemic Situation Tracker”.
The figures shown were much higher than official estimates. Taiwanese netizen Hiroki Lo on Jan 26th reported that Tencent and NetEase were both posting “unmodified statistics,” before switching to official numbers soon, mostly due to the nudge from the Chinese government.
Many experts had already questioned the veracity of China’s official statistics for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. But the astronomically higher figures could mean that the epidemic is of such large proportions that the Chinese Communist government is doing everything to minimize the damage.
As all Communist countries, China too has now been accused of trying to hide the true damage caused by the coronavirus. While Tencent data that was accidentally leaked showed the true extent of the epidemic, the government was quick to arm-twist it and revert to its official figures say news reports.
Netizens have noticed that Tencent has on at least three occasions posted extremely high numbers, only to quickly lower them to government-approved statistics.
Taiwanese netizens have also reported that each time the screen with the large numbers appears, a comparison with the previous day’s data appears above which demonstrates a “reasonable” incremental increase, much like comparisons of official numbers.
This has led many to speculate that Tencent has two sets of data, the real data and “processed” data which match the official figures.
Internal reports from Wuhan say that the Tencent figures may be true as many coronavirus patients are unable to receive treatment and die outside of hospitals.
A severe shortage of test kits has also lead to a lower number of diagnosed cases of infection and death. In addition, there have been many reports of doctors being ordered to list other forms of death instead of coronavirus to keep the death toll artificially low, says the Taiwan News report.
(With inputs from agencies)
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