Coronavirus: others will revise death tolls like China, World Health Organisation says

City of Wuhan, where outbreak was first reported, has raised its fatality count by 50 per cent to account for misreporting issues in early stages of pandemic

‘All countries will face this,’ says WHO emergencies director, urging nations to produce precise data as early as possible

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WHO Emergencies Programme technical lead Maria van Kerkhove (with Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus) at a coronavirus briefing in Geneva, Switzerland in March. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 4:36am, 18 Apr 2020Updated: 5:33am, 18 Apr 2020

The World Health Organisation said on Friday that many countries were likely to follow China in revising up their death tolls once they start getting the coronavirus crisis under control.

Wuhan, the one-time Covid-19 epicentre, admitted missteps in tallying its death toll, abruptly raising the city’s count by 50 per cent – following growing world doubts about Chinese transparency over the outbreak.

The WHO said Wuhan had been overwhelmed by the virus, which emerged in the city in December, and the authorities had been too swamped to ensure 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 government’s recording of infections as it repeatedly changed its counting criteria at the peak of the crisis.

“This is something that is a challenge in an ongoing outbreak: to identify all of your cases and all of your deaths,” Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, told a virtual press conference in Geneva.