Coronavirus: Why many deaths will never appear in official figures
- Wuhan’s overburdened health workers are unable to confirm many of those who died were suffering from Covid-19, so they will not show up in official figures
- The families of those who die at home are also denied the comfort of being able to make proper funeral arrangements
Retired Wuhan factory worker Wei Junlan had always been in good health, but around two weeks after developing the first signs of a cough and fever, the 63-year-old was dead from what doctors suspect was the new coronavirus.
But her death on January 21 will not show up in official statistics about the outbreak – her death certificate listed the cause only as “heavy pneumonia”.
Her nephew Jerry Shang said that Wei had not been tested for the disease, but that the doctor said her symptoms – including a lung infection, fever and increasing weakness – closely matched those of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
By the end she was unable to walk, and the last the family saw of her was when she was being wheeled into the emergency room. The doctor told the family: “It’s the pneumonia that everybody around the country knows about.”
Local doctors have heard of many such cases and many Wuhan residents have complained that family members cannot get a proper diagnosis because frontline hospitals are overwhelmed in the face of high patient numbers and a shortage of supplies and testing kits.
Wei Peng, a community hospital doctor in the city, said that medical staff were not allowed to list coronavirus as a cause of death when cases had not been confirmed and said that later instructions had even banned them from listing pneumonia. Instead they can only write the immediate cause of a patient’s death, such as diabetes or organ failure.