While the authorities continue to insist the death toll from the outbreak in Wuhan is just 2,535, news reports and social media posts over the weekend revealed that seven crematoriums in Wuhan have been handing out over 3,500 urns per day since the restrictions were eased.The Chinese numbers are about as reliable as the Russian ones.
The crematoriums have told families they hope to have completed the distribution of urns by April 5, when the traditional grave-tending festival of Qing Ming takes place. If the numbers of urns handed out so far remains consistent, that will mean the remains of over 40,000 people will be distributed in less than two weeks.
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2 comments:
I think it's institutional: nobody wants to be the guy who reports bad news up the chain of command. It's the same thing that had the CIA saying that the USSR's economy was the world's third largest a year before the Berlin Wall fell. The CIA was getting its info from the Central Committee itself, but the info was completely wrong.
Yes, I expect there's a certain amount of malice towards the West in play here, but you don't need that to explain the lousy data.
Not giving bad news to the chain of command is baked into the Chinese system, apparently for millennia.
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