Like China, which announced an additional 1,290 deaths in Wuhan on Friday, many countries will have to review the human toll of the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
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The macabre counting of cases and deaths of the new coronavirus is hampered by multiple factors, including the overwhelming number of health care workers whose priority is to care for the sick, the isolation of patients who succumb at home or bureaucratic procedures too heavy. " It is something difficult to achieve during a crisis, to identify all the cases and identify all the dead, " noted Maria Van Kerkhove, a manager of pandemic management at WHO, during a conference of virtual press Friday in Geneva.
“ We can expect that many countries will find themselves in a similar situation, where they will have to review their registers and ask themselves: have we listed them all? ", She added. China has reported an additional 1,290 deaths in Wuhan, the cradle of the pandemic, of the victims who actually died at home, according to local authorities, bringing to 4,632 the total number of deaths in the most populous country in the world. According to Maria van Kerkhove, China has crossed several databases to arrive at this new assessment, after having received late reports from funeral directors, overwhelmed hospitals, field hospitals, laboratories, detention centers, clinics and homes for the aged.
President Donald Trump on Friday accused Beijing of underestimating the human toll in China. “ China has just announced the doubling of the number of deaths caused by the Invisible Enemy. It is much higher than that and much higher than that of the United States! "Tweeted the tenant of the White House, whose country has more than 33,000 dead. Also suspected of having delayed alerting to the onset of the epidemic and then having downplayed its magnitude, China defended itself on Friday from all concealment. " There has never been any cover-up and we will never allow any cover-up, " said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. Since its appearance in late 2019 in Wuhan, a metropolis in the center of the country, the coronavirus has infected more than 2 million people worldwide, leading to the unprecedented confinement of at least 4.5 billion people.
