For weeks, the mainstream media has insisted that the coronavirus numbers coming out of China are entirely accurate and that anyone that dares to question them is putting out “fake news”. Even as we have gotten to the point where it has become mind-numbingly obvious that the Chinese are not being straight with us, the mainstream media has not wavered. Well, now even the White House is questioning the accuracy of the numbers. President Trump has tried to be publicly supportive of Chinese President Xi Jinping during this outbreak, and he probably would have overlooked a little fudging of the numbers. But at this point things have gotten so absurd that a White House official has told CNBC that the administration does not “have high confidence in the information coming out of China”…
The White House said this week it does “not have high confidence in the information coming out of China” regarding the count of coronavirus cases, a senior administration official told CNBC. Meanwhile, China has reportedly been reluctant to accept help from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and has reportedly suppressed information about the outbreak from scientists that it deems alarming.
That is basically a nice way of saying that Trump considers the numbers coming out of China to be a load of garbage.
Needless to say, “the White House” does not see things differently from President Trump.
In fact, anyone in the White House that does not line up with Trump’s views is not likely to last there for very long.
And we should applaud Trump for calling it like it is in this case. Obviously the official numbers that China has been giving us are fraudulent. In a recent article, Zero Hedge summarized some of the reasons why we know this is true…
As we’ve been highlighting for weeks, China’s official coronavirus numbers aren’t adding up. The evidence is overwhelming; overloaded crematoriums in Hubei province, to the official death rate maintaining an improbable 2.1%(within + / – 0.1%) for weeks, to coronavirus deaths counted as pneumonia before they were able to test positive – and finally, all the bodies currently decomposing in apartments (government-sealed or not).
If the numbers that China was giving us were real, we would expect to see at least some slight fluctuations in the death rate.
But instead they keep giving us numbers that are mathematically absurd. The following comes from Barron’s…
China’s economic data have always been fraught. Now, all eyes are on the coronavirus numbers, which economists and investors are using to estimate the outbreak’s toll—and they are too perfect to mean much.
A statistical analysis of China’s coronavirus casualty data shows a near-perfect prediction model that data analysts say isn’t likely to naturally occur, casting doubt over the reliability of the numbers being reported to the World Health Organization.
In addition, the anecdotal evidence that keeps coming out of China suggests a far higher death toll than the Chinese are reporting.
People have literally been dropping dead in the streets over and over again, body bags filled with corpses have been piling up at the hospitals, and crematoriums in Wuhan have been running 24 hours a day for weeks.
In fact, one crematorium recently “processed” 127 bodies on a single day…
As of Feb. 14, the Chinese central government announced that more than one thousand patients have died in Wuhan in the past 45 days. But staff at local crematoriums told The Epoch Times in recent interviews that their intake has skyrocketed in recent weeks, forcing them to work round the clock in order to process the bodies daily. One crematorium official said the facility recently peaked at processing 127 bodies in one day.
Keep in mind, that is just one crematorium, and it is being reported that every crematorium in Wuhan is burning bodies around the clock.
Thanks to social media, we also know that funeral homes in the epicenter of this outbreak are so desperate for workers that they are actually offering 143 dollars an hour to collect dead bodies…
According to the recruitment issued on Feb. 12, the funeral home needs 20 workers to pick up bodies from midnight to 4 a.m. Listed among the requirements for the job candidates are “16 to 50 years old…being physically strong and brave.”
The salary is 1,000 yuan ($143) per hour—a high sum compared with the average Chinese salary.
So you can believe the official death toll if you want, but the evidence suggests a death toll of thousands upon thousands in Wuhan alone.
Of course China has a long history of reporting questionable numbers in a variety of fields, and so we shouldn’t exactly be surprised at what they are doing.
And in the days ahead, Chinese “management” of this crisis is only going to get stricter. In fact, President Xi Jinping is calling for even tighter control “over online discussion”…
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for tightened control over online discussion and increased policing to ensure “positive energy” and social stability, state media said Saturday, as the country struggles to contain the deadly new coronavirus.
Xi’s remarks were made public as the authorities have faced rare bouts of public anger over the handling of an epidemic that has killed more than 1,500 people and infected some 66,000 across the country.
In other words, he is quite determined to keep the truth from getting out.
The Chinese always want to project a facade of success, and that may explain why the number of confirmed cases that they are reporting is starting to level off.
Meanwhile, the number of cases outside of China has roughly doubled over the past week, and the fact that a case has now been confirmed in Africa has Bill Gates particularly concerned…
Bill Gates has warned that coronavirus in Africa could overwhelm health services and trigger a pandemic which could cause 10 million deaths.
The Microsoft founder and global health pioneer was speaking at the AAAS meeting in Seattle just hours before the first case was confirmed in Cairo, Egypt.
There are now fears that the disease could spread to sub-Saharan Africa where it could spark an uncontrollable outbreak, with health services unable to monitor or control the virus.
We shall see what happens. I am still hoping that President Trump is right and that this outbreak will start to fizzle when warmer weather arrives. But even if this outbreak begins to fade, it is still going to be a really crazy year. These are truly unprecedented times, and global events are really starting to spiral out of control.
As things get crazier, national governments are going to be greatly tempted to try to control the flow of information, and that is just one of the reasons why a free and open Internet is so extremely important.