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  • 2020-04-06 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Millions of Canceled Cellphones Reveal Unreported Coronavirus Deaths in China? (en)
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  • In the first few months of 2020, as the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic sprouted in China, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published figures showing a drop of about 21 million cellphone users and 840,000 landline users. According to The Associated Press, online data published by China’s three largest cellphone carriers indicated that for January and February 2020, China Mobile Ltd. reported a drop of nearly 7.25 million subscribers, while China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd. lost 7.8 million subscribers and China Telecom Corp. lost 5.6 million in February alone. As of April 2020, China had reported a total of about 81,000 COVID-19 cases and about 3,300 deaths from the disease. Some sources seized on the disparity between the numbers of afflicted and cellphone subscribers to assert that the true COVID-19 death in China had been concealed and vastly underreported. 21 Million Fewer Cellphone Users in China May Suggest a High CCP Virus Death Toll, proclaimed a headline in The Epoch Times. China Is Lying About the Number of COVID-19 Deaths, declared the Panam Post: It is true that intelligence officials outside of China believe that the country's government has understated the spread of the coronavirus and the damage the pandemic has caused there, as The New York Times, among others, reported in early April 2020: The Times reported again the following day that Chinese officials appeared to be pushing for quick burials of the dead and suppressing online discussion of fatalities in order to head off public opprobrium over the government's handling of the coronavirus outbreak: Still, to believe that the drop in cellphone subscriptions experienced by Chinese carriers corresponds directly to unreported coronavirus deaths, one would have to believe that the Chinese government managed to misreport COVID-19 mortality in that country by a factor of about 7,000 ... and then let the cat out of the bag by openly publishing statistics about cellphone usage that revealed those unreported deaths. Perhaps some correlation exists, but as The Associated Press reported, the drop in cellphone subscriptions in China could also be attributable to reasons other than millions of subscribers' succumbing to COVID-19: (en)
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