China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday boasted that Chinese manufacturers are “going all-out” to manufacture ventilators for coronavirus patients — an odd boast since the Chinese government’s official position is that the coronavirus strains sweeping the country are mild and almost no one is growing seriously ill or dying.
The Global Times saluted state-owned Beijing Aerospace Changfeng Co. for supposedly breaking “the monopoly of imported ventilators” by creating “safe, reliable, and reasonably priced respiratory products.”
According to the company’s general manager, Hou Yunlong, employees are sleeping right next to the factory so they can work grueling hours in an “all-out” bid to “ensure the supply of medical treatment resources.”
The Global Times explained that ventilators are “crucial for critically-ill patients in the ICU,” and lauded China’s ventilator manufacturers for their “strong production capacity at the beginning of the [Chinese coronavirus] outbreak in 2020,” which does not square with the narrative that foreign manufacturers held a cruel “monopoly” on ventilators until plucky Beijing Aerospace Changfeng broke it.
In fact, a Chinese Communist minister quoted by the Global Times said there were at least 21 domestic ventilator companies as of March 2020, eight of them were producing over 2,000 units a week, and collectively they accounted for 20 percent of global production capacity. Reading between the lines, the real problem for the Chinese ventilator industry seems to be difficulty securing foreign-made components due to economic sanctions, trade restrictions, and supply chain difficulties after the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic spread across the world.
The greater narrative challenge for the Global Times is that once the regime in Beijing decided to relax its ludicrously heavy-handed coronavirus policies in December and instantly switched to having almost no policies at all, it began treating the fast-spreading coronavirus like a modest flu.
https://www.wionews.com/world/china-downgrades-covid-management-to-class-b-what-does-it-mean-546962
As the Global Times itself noted, Chinese coronavirus was even downgraded from a Class A infection to Class B, which eliminates the need for emergency management – and releases medical resources to be used for other purposes. Chinese companies should not be working overtime to crank out ventilators for a disease that is not putting anyone’s life in jeopardy.
The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Wednesday once again warned China to stop lying about the number of infections and deaths it is experiencing. China claims there have only been 22 coronavirus fatalities in the entire country since the beginning of December.
W.H.O. Emergencies Director Mike Ryan said on Wednesday that China’s claims “under-represent the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, in terms of ICU admissions, and particularly in terms of deaths.” As noted above, the ventilators the Global Times touted are ICU equipment.
W.H.O. is so desperate for accurate data from China that Ryan hinted doctors could go rogue, bypass their Chinese Communist Party minders, and slip information to W.H.O. under the table.
“We do not discourage doctors and nurses reporting these deaths and these cases. We have an open approach to be able to record the actual impact of disease in society,” Ryan said.
W.H.O. also found it implausible that China could have so many coronavirus cases without detecting any new strains of Chinese coronavirus, possibly because Chinese government doctors are studiously avoiding testing for new strains.
Outside estimates that China is concealing thousands of coronavirus deaths were supported by a Bloomberg News report on Tuesday that a funeral home in Shanghai is giving mourners only five or ten minutes to mourn their loved ones before ushering them out.
Demand for funeral services is so intense that Chinese police have arrested dozens of “funeral scalpers” – people without lost relatives who got in line at overbooked funeral homes only to sell their spot in line to desperate mourners.
A British-based medical analysis firm called Airfinity estimated on Wednesday that China is suffering 14,700 coronavirus deaths a day, and could have over 1.7 million deaths by April.