Beijing: China’s National Health Commission on Friday removed 108 deaths from the total death toll in the country in order to amend a double-counting error in Hubei province, the media reported.
The overall death toll due to coronavirus increased to 1,380 in China at the end of Thursday, with 63,851 confirmed cases, the commission said.
“Because of duplicated Hubei province statistics, 108 are written off,” CNBC quoted a statement from the commission as saying.
As of midnight on Wednesday, it had reported 1,367 cumulative deaths after 242 additional deaths due to the virus were reported from Hubei that day.
The changes in the data raised questions of transparency in revealing the accurate death toll in some quarters.
The doubts over the accuracy of data grew after Hubei’s health commission early on Thursday reported that the number of confirmed cases in the area went up to 14,840 on Wednesday from 1,638 on Tuesday.
The Hubei provincial health commission suggested that the number of confirmed cases increased after it started counting the number of “clinically diagnosed” people in the province, which allows them to receive the same treatment as those who have tested positive for the illness.
The new criteria refers to using CT imaging scans to diagnose patients. Previously, many patients with pneumonia-like symptoms found via CT scans could not be diagnosed as positive without an additional nucleic acid test.
