37 / 48
21
SATURDAY, APRIL 18, 2020
Cambodia’s Senate
passes draft bill on
state of emergency
amid COVID-19
pandemic
Page 22
BEIJING (AP) — At least 50 per cent more
people died in China’s virus epicentre of
Wuhan than previously counted, with state
media yesterday attributing the initial
undercount to how overwhelmed the health
system was coping with thousands of
sick people.
The addition of 1,290 victims raised
Wuhan’s death toll to 3,869, the most in
China, and may conirm suspicions that far
more people died in the city where the illness
began than has been previously announced.
The total conirmed cases in the city of
11 million people also increased by 325 to
50,333, accounting for about two-thirds of
China’s total 82,367 announced cases.
The revised Wuhan igures raised
China’s death toll to 4,632, up from
3,342 announced by the National Health
Commission yesterday morning.
The oficial
Xinhua News Agency
quoted
an unidentiied oficial withWuhan’s epidemic
and prevention and control headquarters
as saying that during the early stages of
the outbreak, “due to the insuficiency in
admission and treatment capability, a few
medical institutions failed to connect with
the disease prevention and control system
in time, while hospitals were overloaded and
medics were overwhelmed with patients.
“As a result, belated, missed and mistaken
reporting occurred,” the oficial was quoted
as saying.
The new igures were compiled by
comparing data from Wuhan’s epidemic
preventionandcontrol system, thecity funeral
service, the municipal hospital authority,
and nucleic acid testing to “remove double-
counted cases and ill in missed cases,” the
oficial was quoted as saying.
Deaths occurring outside hospitals had
not been registered previously and some
medical institutions had conirmed cases
but reported them late or not at all, the
oficial said.
Questions have long swirled around the
accuracy of China’s case reporting, with
Wuhan in particular going several days in
January without reporting new cases or
deaths. That has led to accusations that
Chinese oficials were seeking to minimise
the impact of the outbreak and wasting
opportunities to bring it under control in a
shorter time.
A group of eight medical workers, including
a doctor who later died of the virus, were even
threatened by police for trying to alert people
about the disease over social media.
Chinese oficials have stridently denied
covering up cases, saying their reports were
accurate and timely. However, the United
Nations’ (UN) World Health Organization
(WHO) has come under criticism for
defending China’s handling of the outbreak
and United States (US) President Donald
Trump is suspending funding to the WHO
over what he alleges is its pro-China bias.
Trump’s blaming of China came after he
initially spent weeks showered praise on Chi-
nese President Xi Jinping over the country’s
performance in the pandemic, while largely
dismissing the risk it posed to the US.
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA (AP) — South Korea’s
Supreme Court said yesterday it will re-open a
case related to the enslavement and abuse of
thousands of people at a vagrants’ facility in
the 1970s and 1980s, over three decades after
its owner was acquitted of serious charges. A
inding that the government failed to protect
the constitutional rights of former inmates
could boost their push for compensation.
In November 2018, then-Prosecutor
General Moon Moo-il requested an
“exceptional appeal” of the case of late owner
of state-funded Brothers Home Park In-keun,
who was acquitted in 1989 of charges linked
to illegal coninement of inmates in a widely
criticised ruling. Park, who served a short
prison term for embezzlement and other
relatively minor charges, died in 2016.
Under South Korean law, an exceptional
appeal allows the court to correct grave
mistakes in interpretation of law, though
it cannot impose new punishment on the
defendant. The court told The Associated
Press (AP) that it will hear the case with a
full panel and will begin with a closed-door
session of its justices next Thursday to review
court records and other evidence. It remains
unclear how much of the hearings will be
open to the public and whether former
inmates will be called to testify.
No one has been held accountable for
hundreds of deaths, rapes and beatings at
Brothers Home that were documented by an
AP report in 2016.
The AP report was based on hundreds of
exclusivedocumentsanddozensofinterviews
with oficials and former detainees, which
showed that the abuse at Brothers Home
was much more vicious and widespread than
previously known.
In a follow-up report in 2019, the AP
described how Brothers Home also shipped
children overseas for adoption as part of a
massive proit-seeking enterprise.
Military dictators in the 1960s to 1980s
ordered roundups of vagrants to beautify
the streets, sending thousands of homeless
and disabled people and children to facilities
where they were detained and forced to
work. The drive intensiied as South Korea
began preparing to bid for and host the
1988 Summer Olympics. Brothers Home, a
mountainside compound in the southern city
of Busan, was the largest of these facilities
and had around 4,000 inmates when its
horrors were exposed in early 1987.
Wuhan raises number of virus dead by 1,290
Passengers from Wuhan stand in lines designating where they will quarantine in Beijing, China. PHOTO: AP
South Korean court to re-open case on abusive vagrant facility