China Concealing Real COVID-19 Death Toll to Save Face: Dr. Scott Atlas

Patients on stretchers are seen at Tongren hospital in Shanghai on Jan. 3, 2023. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

A former White House adviser said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is covering the truth of the COVID-19 situation in China for fear of its reputation being undermined.

According to a Peking University study, the latest COVID-19 outbreak in China is estimated to have affected 900 million Chinese, with approximately 80 percent displaying severe symptoms. Following worldwide pressure for statistics and transparency, Chinese health officials acknowledged on Jan. 14, 2023, that roughly 60,000 COVID-related deaths had occurred in hospitals throughout the country in December 2022.

Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and former adviser from the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said “we cannot trust the numbers coming out of China. They didn’t make sense in the beginning,” in an interview with The Epoch Times’s sister media, NTD, on Jan. 17, 2023.

Atlas cited a widening gap between official figures and the number of reported cremations to prove his point.

“Even though there were reports of a lot of cremations ... they implied that there were no death numbers coming out,” he said.

A worker at Baoxing funeral home in Shanghai told The Epoch Times in December 2022 that they were burning 400 to 500 bodies a day, up from the maximum of 90 before the pandemic restrictions were lifted.

Another resident in the nearby city of Suzhou described the crowded condition at Suzhou Funeral Home as akin to the city’s most famous shopping street, which is always packed.

“It’s very difficult to figure out what’s going on when there is no transparency, and we have a country that apparently prefers to save face rather than tell the truth and cooperate fully with the international community,” Atlas said.

China’s Elderly Population

Atlas said that China’s elderly will be hit hard by COVID, citing the situation of the United States as an example.

Adults 65 and older account for 16 percent of the U.S. population but account for 80 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the United States, as reported by Kaiser Family Foundation in 2020.

“If you look at China’s population, they have a really very, very dangerous demographic in their country for this illness because they have an enormous population of older people,” Atlas said.

According to statistics, adults aged 65 and older accounted for 14.9 percent of China’s population in 2022.

Atlas believes with the zero-COVID policies that had been implemented over the past three years, the communist regime failed to protect this high-risk group.

“They locked everybody down instead of doing a lot of protection, specifically, of the high-risk population, which are the older, frail people,” He said.

“They should have done targeted protection from the beginning, they should have done everything they could to protect the very, very old people, and they should not have destroyed people and locked up their population in a very barbaric level,” he added.

Its excessive focus on “clearing” the virus and cases over the past three years has allegedly strained China’s medical infrastructure.

Hospitals in China are overwhelmed and lack intensive care unit beds, ventilators, drug stockpiles, and other health care tools.

With the strain on the hospitals and the lack of transparency from China, Atlas predicts “a very tragic loss of life in their population because they have so many elderly.”

Dorothy Li, Jenny Li, and Lynn Xu contributed to this report.