Wuhan city in China, which was the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, on Friday, revised its COVID-19 death toll by 50 per cent. WHO says that many countries are now likely to follow suit and revise their death tolls or number of people infected by the novel coronavirus.
Wuhan’s admittance of missteps in tallying the COVID-19 death toll followed doubts other countries were raising about China’s transparency over the outbreak.
Michael Ryan, the WHO's emergencies director, said that all countries will face this complication and urged nations to produce precise data as early as possible. Ryan said that correct data regarding deaths due to the virus and those infected will keep WHO on top of what the impact is and allow them to project forward in a much more accurate way.
WHO on Friday said that Wuhan was overwhelmed by the virus and that authorities were swamped when the virus emerged in December and hence could not ensure that every death and infection was properly recorded.
Authorities in Wuhan initially tried to cover up the outbreak, punishing doctors who had raised the alarm online, and there have been questions about the Chinese government's recording of infections as it repeatedly changed its counting criteria at the peak of the crisis.
Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, said, “This is something that is a challenge in an ongoing outbreak: To identify all of your cases and all of your deaths.”
China particularly came under fire for botched numbers because there had been reports of the government censoring medical professionals who tried raising alarm bells about the virus.
Kerkhove said, “I would anticipate that many countries are going to be in a similar situation where they will have to go back and review records and look to see: Did we capture all of them?” She added that the Wuhan authorities had now reviewed their databases and cross-checked for discrepancies.
Wuhan added 1,290 deaths to its toll, raising the total to 3,869, and added a further 325 cases, bringing the number of infections to 50,333.
Africa worry
As per an AFP tally, more than 2 million people have been infected with COVID-19, while more than 145,000 have lost their lives. Most of these cases and deaths have been reported from the US or Europe. But WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said there could be a "worrying trend" emerging in Africa.
As per WHO’s tally, there have been 11,843 confirmed cases and 550 deaths on the continent.
Ghebreyesus said, “In the past week, there has been a 51 per cent increase in the number of reported cases in my continent, Africa, and a 60 per cent increase in the number of reported deaths."
His colleagues at WHO maintain that the situation was not beyond control, given Africa's long experience of having to battle fatal disease outbreaks.
In a report released on Friday by United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, "Anywhere between 300,000 and 3.3 million African people could lose their lives as a direct result of COVID-19, depending on the intervention measures taken to stop the spread."
