Staff sell masks at a Yifeng Pharmacy in Wuhan, Chin, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2020. Pharmacies in Wuhan are restricting customers to buying one mask at a time amid high demand and worries over an outbreak of a new coronavirus. The number of cases of the new virus has risen over 400 in China and the death toll to 9, Chinese health authorities said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

China has been attempting to paint itself as a country that has the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic under control while pushing itself as a global leader in the fight against it. Many media outlets are perfectly happy to carry their narrative, including here in America. Every day you see an American news outlet proclaim that a country has now surpassed China in infection and/or death rates.

One location China is touting as under control is the city of Wuhan, where the virus originated. According to China, there haven’t been any new cases reported for some time. To say this is disputed is putting it lightly. There’s ample evidence that says the virus is still raging within China and lives are being taken.

In fact, based on calculations made by its own residents, the real death toll is somewhere around 47,000.

As Radio Free Asia reported, residents in Wuhan are telling a much more dire story than the 2,500 number it gave to the world. For one, the incinerators have been working around the clock and handing out urns of ashes to 500 families a day:

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.

“It can’t be right … because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” an Wuhan resident surnamed Zhang told RFA on Friday.

“They started distributing ashes and starting interment ceremonies on
Monday,” he said.

Seven funeral homes currently serve Wuhan — a huge conurbation of three cities: Hankou, Wuchang and Hanyang.

The calculations on Chinese social media began in earnest:

Another popular estimate is based on the cremation capacity of the funeral homes, which run a total of 84 furnaces with a capacity over 24 hours of 1,560 urns city-wide, assuming that one cremation takes one hour.

This calculation results in an estimated 46,800 deaths.

A resident of Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, said most people there now believe that more than 40,000 people died in the city before and during the lockdown.

Residents speculate that the reason China is attempting to withhold the real number of deaths is that they want the people to ease into the reality of the situation. However, from the perspective of this free American, it’s clearly China’s attempt to control the global narrative about itself.

The cremations of so many people are giving away the real story, and the real story is that the numbers are much higher than China is admitting. According to RFA, funeral homes report on cremations to Chinese authorities twice a day.

“Every funeral home reports data on cremations directly to the authorities twice daily,” said a source close to the provincial civil affairs bureau. “This means that each funeral home only knows how many cremations it has conducted, but not the situation at the other funeral homes.”

Meaning that the outbreak in China is still raging and the Chinese government is lying to the rest of us, including those in Wuhan. According to a man with the surname “Chen,” nobody in Wuhan believes the official death count.

“The official number of deaths was 2,500 people … but before the epidemic began, the city’s crematoriums typically cremated around 220 people a day,” he said.

“But during the epidemic, they transferred cremation workers from around China to Wuhan keep cremate bodies around the clock,” he added.