WHO anticipates more countries' update of COVID-19 figures

Experts at the World Health Organization believe that many countries will face the similar situation as Chinese city of Wuhan to update their numbers of confirmed cases and deaths from COVID-19.

A total of 1,290 people were added to the death toll of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, in central China's Hubei province, after the city government included those who died at home and corrected some inaccuracies in reporting occurring in the early stages of the outbreak, the Wuhan headquarters for COVID-19 epidemic prevention and control said in a notification on Friday.

By the end of Thursday, the COVID-19 fatalities in Wuhan, the hardest hit city by the outbreak in China, reached 3,869. The total number of confirmed infections was revised up 325 to 50,333.

Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, said that it was done in an attempt to leave no case undocumented. "What they did is that they review different data bases," she told a virtual press conference from Geneva.

Wuhan looked at the data base that is kept from all of the confirmed cases, the funeral service systems, hospital systems and laboratories to see if there were any duplications and if there were any cases missing, and they looked for cases in fever clinics, hospitals and detention centers and elderly care centers, according to Van Kerkhove.

"What they have reported is the discrepancies in these cases," she said.

Van Kerkhove explained that the reasons for the discrepancies were due to the factors that the healthcare system in Wuhan was overwhelmed at one point and some patients died at home. Also, medical staff were delayed in reporting cases because they were focused on providing care for those patients and did not fill out the forms in time.

She added that there were additional makeshift hospitals built in places such as stadiums to care for the mild cases.

"In those cases, the reporting was not done in a timely manner. So those cases were added," she said.

Van Kerkhove, who spent two weeks in China during the outbreak, explained that in some situations, the reports were not filled completely. "And so what they did is they did a review of that and they revised their numbers," she said.

She emphasized that it is very important to know the number of people who have died from COVID-19 because this is of public health importance, and it is important to have the accurate reporting of this.

She stressed that this is something that is a challenge in an ongoing outbreak to identify all of your cases and to identify all of the deaths as an outbreak happens, especially when the system is overwhelmed.

"I would anticipate many countries are going to be in a similar situation when they will have to go back to review the records, and look to see 'did we capture all of them,'" she said, adding that she read new reports that people died outside of hospital system in a number of countries.

Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO program, echoed the view that countries will face similar situations. But he said WHO would like countries to be as fast as possible in that process to keeps the organization on top of the situation.

"It's important that countries provide that data as quickly as they can in the interest of moving our collective effort forward to control this pandemic," he said.