If you were to look at the “official” statistics put out by China (and endorsed by the corrupt World Health Organization), what you’d see is a claim that only 121,536 have died of COVID-19 over the course of the entire pandemic. Further, the communist nation claims that its people have only contracted 99,296,816 total cases. While that may seem like a lot, it’s actually a very low percentage when you consider China has 1.4 billion people.

(Also see: Biden Administration Suspends Funding to Wuhan Institute of Virology Over Safety Concerns)

In other words, the “official” numbers are absolutely laughable. They are so far off of what is even possible that you’d think the Chinese would have pumped them up a bit more to make them seem realistic.

Instead, a relentless censorship campaign was instituted. As early as March 2020, it was clear CCP officials were lying about the real impact, with leaked pictures of overwhelmed mortuaries directly counting the government narrative. Now, an accidental release in one of the nation’s provinces is providing a good baseline for what the real number of COVID deaths is.

Official data from China offered a rare, but brief, glimpse of the true toll of Covid, indicating that nearly as many people may have died from the virus in a single province earlier this year as Beijing has said died in the mainland during the entire pandemic.

The data was deleted from a provincial government website just days after it was published on Thursday. But epidemiologists who reviewed a cached version of the information said it was the latest indication that the country’s official tally is a vast undercount.

The number of cremations in the eastern province of Zhejiang rose to 171,000 in the first quarter of this year, the website said. That was 72,000 more cremations, a roughly 70 percent increase, than had been reported in the same period last year.

What these numbers correspond with is the end of China’s so-called “zero COVID policy.” That’s important to note because the press is falling into the propaganda trap of reporting this rise in deaths as correlating with the lifting of lockdowns. What’s more likely is that these levels of excess deaths have been happening the entire pandemic. That would place the number of dead even higher than the death totals being extrapolated from this accidental data release in Zhejiang province.

So what is that number?

Another team of researchers — Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of biology and statistics at the University of Texas at Austin and Zhanwei Du, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong — reached a rough estimate of 1.54 million deaths from December through March in mainland China, based on the cremation count.

If 1.54 million people died in China of COVID-19 in just a four-month stretch (in 2023, no less), I shudder to think what the total death number actually is over the last three and a half years.

Unfortunately, the “experts” quoted in the Times article seem to accept the idea that COVID-19 deaths were very low while the zero COVID policy was in effect, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe that given what we know about how the disease spreads. The real number of total deaths is almost certainly in the many millions. That would place China in a similar position as other large, dense nations.

For example, the total number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States currently amounts to 1.13 million. That’s misleading, though, because the CDC reports anyone infected with the virus as a COVID death even if they died of something else. The statistically comparable total is significantly lower, making parity with China’s true numbers even more likely.

Unfortunately, no one in the global community seems intent on holding China accountable. That includes the Biden administration, which wants no part in adjudicating the origins of the virus. To do so would mean having to place blame on Beijing, and we can’t have that.