By Lizzie Day • Published: 26 Apr 2020 • 1:13
THE UK government has removed China from graphs it uses to compare the UK’s coronavirus deaths to those elsewhere amid accusations the country has covered up the true impact of the pandemic.
The official toll in China, where the virus first broke out in December, currently stands at 4,632, a fraction of those registered across Europe and the United States.
A graph shown at a Downing Street press briefing on Wednesday compared the death tolls of nine countries – the UK, the US, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, and China – over time.
On the updated graph shown on Thursday, China had been removed.
China had previously been among those countries – Germany, Sweden, and South Korea – whose death tolls plateaued early on in the outbreak and have remained below 5,000.
The current tolls in the US, France, and the UK are 53,745, 22,614, and 20,319 respectively.
Speculation has swirled about information out of China since the earliest stages of the pandemic, when reports emerged of doctors and journalists being harassed and detained for trying to raise the alarm.
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