UK press report PM Johnson has been advised the death toll in China has been understated by a factor of 15 to 40 times'
A senior Cabinet Minister :
- 'We can't stand by and allow the Chinese state's desire for secrecy to ruin the world's economy and then come back like nothing has happened."
A senior Minister:
- 'We have always known their wildlife markets are a recipe for a pandemic. China needs to close these down immediately. If they don't, they will rightly become a pariah state.'
Separately, RFA:
- Wuhan residents said they were growing increasingly skeptical that the figure of some 2,500 deaths in the city to date was accurate
- Since the start of the week, seven large funeral homes in Wuhan have been handing out the cremated remains of around 500 people to their families every day, suggesting that far more people died than ever made the official statistics.
- news website Caixin.com reported that 5,000 urns had been delivered by a supplier to the Hankou Funeral Home in one day alone -- double the official number of deaths.
Questions have long persisted about the veracity of Chinese economic data, This is a whole new scale of concern.
