What We Really Want to Know When Wuhan Reopens
Investors trying to parse the economic hit from Covid-19 have little reliable data to work with.
The case of the missing cases.
Photographer: STR/AFPThe rainy, misty early April is the season we Chinese mourn our dead. As the lockdown lifts in the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, just in time for Wuhan's famous cherry blossoms, many of us want to know how many lives the virus claimed.
Official statistics put Wuhan at more than 50,000 infected cases and just over 2,300 dead. But Caixin, an influential news outlet, reported that a shortage of testing kits and overflowing hospitals could mean actual figures are much higher, as many of the ill spent their final hours at home. To get to the bottom of this, you’d have to collect data from local district offices, and Wuhan has 2,033 administrative zones.