(Minghui.org) The recent data published by the Chinese authorities indicated that among the hospitals in one city in Hubei Province, the recovery rate from COVID-19 infection was as high as 97% and the death rate was as low as 2.3%.
A Minghui correspondent interviewed Dr. Zheng (alias), who works in the intensive care unit (ICU) in a hospital in the said city. He explained how his hospital managed to report zero confirmed cases in recent weeks even though they were still treating coronavirus patients.
Dr. Zheng said there were a dozen critically ill patients in his ICU and two of them were on ventilators. To achieve the “high recovery rate” required by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, the hospital discharged five of the patients, including the two on ventilators, after they tested negative for COVID-19. The hospital then re-admitted them on the same day as patients with other illnesses such as stroke, brain hemorrhage, and Alzheimer's.
According to Dr. Zheng, he was called to resuscitate patients with respiratory failure and set up ventilators six times in the 21 days between January 24 and February 13, 2020. Three patients were suspected to have COVID-19, but were never tested. They soon died and were not listed in the confirmed or death cases.
The hospital admitted a total of nearly 400 confirmed COVID-19 cases, but the number of suspected cases remains unknown, since it was never counted.
Among the confirmed patients who were released after testing negative twice, about two dozen were re-admitted after the viral infection recurred. The hospital did not count the reinfections as new cases. In addition to Dr. Zheng's patients, other patients who died but were not tested for COVID-19 were not included in the official count.
To admit regular patients, all hospitals in Dr. Zheng's city were instructed to declare on March 19 that they have become “absolutely free of COVID-19 patients and clean.” The five patients of Dr. Zheng's who were discharged and readmitted were still in ICU, and two other COVID-19 patients were still in the infectious division on that day. For the two ICU patients who were on life support, one died days later and the other remained in critical condition at the time of the interview.
Hospitals in China that meet certain quality standards are divided into three tiers based on their function and mission.
Tier-1 hospitals are hospitals and clinics provide basic services such as preventive medicine, treatments and rehabilitation to a community of a certain size. There are 10,831 tier-1 hospitals, 80 of them in Wuhan.
Tier-2 hospitals provide general medical and health services to multiple communities in a region and perform some level of teaching and research. China has 9,017 tier-2 hospitals, 50 of them in Wuhan.
Tier-3 hospitals provide high-end specialized medical treatments and health services to several regions and perform advanced teaching and research tasks. China has 2,548 tier-3 hospitals, 43 of them in Wuhan.
Dr. Zheng works in a Tier-2 hospital, which was a designated hospital for COVID-19 patients during the epidemic. Wuhan had set up some makeshift hospitals when all three tiers of hospitals became overcrowded with COVID-19 patients.
If the hospitals in Dr. Zheng's city were instructed to clear coronavirus cases, the Minghui correspondent who interviewed him suspects that hospitals in Wuhan and many other cities across China probably received the same order. As a result, the actual number of infected cases and deaths is likely much higher than the officially-reported count.
Many western countries have also doubted China's coronavirus data. A Fox News article published on April 1, 2020 quoted three U.S. intelligence officials as saying that “China's public record of COVID-19 infections was deliberately deceptive and incomplete” and that China's lies have put the world in “jeopardy.”