China has not disclosed the exact number of COVID-19 deaths since it abruptly relaxed quarantines and switched to “with coronavirus” in December last year, and the number of deaths in Zhejiang province has reportedly surged by 70 percent.

The Zhejiang provincial government recently posted the number of local cremations in the first quarter of this year on its website, then removed it, according to a report by the Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Monday.

A screen shot of the webpage, captured before it was removed, showed that more than 170,000 cremations were performed in Zhejiang in the first quarter of this year, a sharp increase from 99,000 in the first quarter of last year and 88,300 in the first quarter of 2020.

RFA explained that Zhejiang, which accounts for about 5% of China’s 1.4 billion people, has a nearly 100% cremation rate for deceased people, meaning that the cremation rate here is fairly close to the actual mortality rate.

Even if every region of China did not have a cremation-to-death ratio as high as Zhejiang’s, RFA noted that extrapolating the number of cremations across the country based on Zhejiang’s statistics suggests that 3.4 million cremations may have taken place in the first quarter.

In January, the World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that China was not being transparent about the number of COVID-19 deaths, 먹튀검증 suggesting that the number was likely much higher than the 80,000 the country said at the time.

The Chinese Center for Disease Prevention and Control said 83,150 people died from COVID-19 infections in hospitals between Dec. 8 last year, when it eased quarantines, and Feb. 9 this year.

“The Chinese government has been hiding and manipulating data since the beginning of the pandemic,” Feng Chongyi, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney, told RFA, “for political purposes to show that China has succeeded in fighting the pandemic.”

“But the death toll reveals what really happened,” he said, noting that the Chinese government’s sudden, unprepared decision to abandon ‘Zero COVID’ and loosen quarantines had devastating consequences for many.