Official Data Accidentally Published In China Reveals True Scale Of COVID Deaths In Communist Nation

Accidentally this week, official data was disclosed in a communist Chinese province, revealing that the extent of the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic has been significantly underreported.

The New York Times reported that data from Zhejiang, an eastern province in China, was mistakenly published on a local government website and subsequently covered by a Chinese news outlet. Both reports were later deleted.

China has officially claimed that around 83,700 people died throughout the entire pandemic across the country. However, the newly revealed data showed that in Zhejiang alone, there was an increase of over 72,000 excess deaths during the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year.

Extrapolating the 70% increase in excess deaths from the province, which has a population of roughly 65 million, to the entire country with nearly 1.5 billion people, would suggest an estimated 1.5 million excess deaths in just the first three months of this year.

China, where the coronavirus outbreak originated in 2019, faced a massive outbreak late last year, which led the communist government to end strict lockdown measures as up to 90% of the country's population became infected within a few months.

The New York Times previously estimated in February that up to 1.5 million people died in China's latest coronavirus wave, and the accidentally published data from China further supported this estimate, gaining agreement from multiple groups of independent experts.

The reported figures only represent a portion of the total deaths the country experienced during the pandemic, which originated in Wuhan.

In April 2020, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) released a "conservative" estimate of the number of deaths China had encountered during the initial months of the pandemic, suggesting a minimum of 136,000 deaths.