The United States has now logged more deaths associated with the coronavirus than the official death toll in China.
The U.S. has had at least 3,415 deaths resulting from COVID-19 complications, while China has had 3,309, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. Despite the grim milestone, some in the U.S. and China believe that Beijing is not being completely forthcoming about how many people died.
The virus, which was first reported in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, quickly spread throughout the country and particularly ravaged Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. Residents there are just now beginning to emerge from their homes and claim the actual total of people who died tallies in the tens of thousands.
Shipments of mass quantities of urns to the province suggest that the death count could be more than 40,000.
“Every funeral home reports data on cremations directly to the authorities twice daily,” a source told Radio Free Asia. “This means that each funeral home only knows how many cremations it has conducted, but not the situation at the other funeral homes.”
Health officials in China, a country of more than 1.3 billion people, revealed on Tuesday they didn’t include asymptomatic patients who had the coronavirus in data on the outbreak, further raising questions about official reporting.
The U.S. and China have engaged in a war of words over the origins of the virus, as some Beijing diplomats have claimed it began with the U.S. military.
President Trump has blamed China for not doing enough to contain the initial spread of the contagion.
“You don’t know what the numbers are in China,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday. “China tells you numbers and … you just don’t know, you know, what are the numbers?”
Other countries such as Iran have also been accused of lying about the death toll. Although it officially has seen almost 2,900 cases, a leading dissident group that has been tallying deaths in cities across the country claims to have documented more than 12,000 deaths. North Korea has not reported a single case of COVID-19, although the government has reportedly been lobbying for more test kits.
Worldwide, the official count stands at more than 823,000 cases and at least 40,708 deaths.
