The Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice of Taiwan announced on February 26 that inaccurate news reports have been flooding Taiwan’s online social media. The usage of terms suggested that  the cyberspace army from mainland China had created them.

This fake news was packaged with events and supposed statements from politicians in Taiwan. For example, “My father is a Parliament Member from the Democratic Progressive Party. He talked about pneumonia last time and said that Taiwan had over 500 infection cases and 200 deaths. Hualien and Taipei were hit badly, but Tsai Ing-wen’s administration didn’t dare to announce it.”

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An unconfirmed Internet posting stated that Cai Erjin is the son of Cai Qi (蔡奇), Beijing Communist Party Secretary. Cai Erjin’s lover was infected with the coronavirus and later transmitted it to Cai Erjin and his wife. Cai Qi and his wife have been put under 14 days of quarantine.

An unconfirmed tweet said that Chua Hwa Por, son-in-law of Li Zhanshu (栗战书), Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, was infected with the coronavirus. Chua was a citizen of Singapore and lived there. Li Zhanshu sent a private plane to bring his son-in-law back to Beijing. Li tried to get him to stay in the military No 301 Hospital, which provides healthcare to the high-ranking officials, but the retired officials who currently stay at the hospital uniformly rejected it. Li then put him in the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, where Cai Qi’s son Cai Erjin also stayed. Xi Jinping was unhappy with bringing a coronavirus patient back to Beijing.

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Taiwan News reported that a video posted on YouTube on February 24 showed a woman in Wuhan, coming out of the hospital. She told the car driver that she saw the patient in the bed next to her was bagged while still alive. He was put into a corpse bag and sent to cremation.

She said, “The man was weak but he was still breathing when the medical workers bound his head and then his hands and feet, which were “still moving.” Then the medical personnel placed the man in a black plastic bag and pulled up the zipper and placed the bag in another plastic bag. The bag was then sent to the funeral house to incinerate.

She said that she saw that a few other patients had also been bagged while still alive.

The Epoch Times also reported that Mr. Tong in Wuhan posted the following on the Internet: “The Doctor asked me to help him carry my father’s dead body. I went into the room and touched his calf. It was still warm. I shouted, ‘Dad.” He opened his eyes and tried to speak. The Doctor was shocked and yelled at me to get out. My dad was then placed naked in the corpse bag. I begged them to put some clothes on him, but they didn’t allow me.”

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Radio France International reported that Xi Jinping said that about half of China’s counties do not have the coronavirus. He gave directions that regions with a low epidemic risk should “fully resume production and living orders.”

Some large manufactures in China offered a bonus to attract workers to return to work. Some local governments also used planes, trains, and buses to bring people back to work.

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China’s Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO) experts held a press conference in Beijing on February 24. At the conference, Bruce Aylward, Assistant Director General of WHO, led a group of experts to visit China to check on the coronavirus situation there. He said that he had been to Wuhan but did not go to the “dirty areas” in the Wuhan hospitals. He then rushed to catch the plane to fly out of China without quarantining himself for 14 days (after returning from Wuhan).

News reporters suspected that “dirty” was a technical term referring to infectious areas.

Source: Australia 51, February 25, 2020
https://en.australia51.com/article/6151DD84-C03D-5B1B-6BEC-0B4E42A5EBF3/

Epoch Times, an independent Chinese language media based in the U.S., provided details from the internal reports that it obtained from the Shandong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These reports, which were provided to the Shandong Provincial Health Commission, showed much higher coronavirus infection counts than the official number that China published.

On February 19, CDC’s and hospitals in Shandong reported 49 new infection cases based on positive results shown in nucleic acid tests. On that day, Shandong announced only 2 new cases. On February 20, 274 cases tested positive (one of which was a case that had been confirmed already), while the officially published number was 202.

Epoch Times created a table to compare the internally reported count vs. the officially announced count from February 8 to February 22. The first column is the date, second column is the officially announced new infection count, the third one is the internally reported cases, and the fourth one is the percent of internal count over the published count.

Image of the Epoch Times’ table:

The nucleic acid test will only show positive for 30-50 percent of the coronavirus infections. Therefore, the actual infection count may be proportionately higher than the report that is officially published.

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Changjiang Daily, a newspaper under the Wuhan Communist Party Committee, published an article in memory of a female doctor Xia Sisi who died from the coronavirus infection at the age of 29.

The article mentioned that on January 14, a patient that Xia was in charge of was confirmed to have the Coronavirus infection. Xia developed symptoms on January 19 and was hospitalized.

However, Hubei reported zero infection cases on January 14.

After people discussed on the Internet that Changjiang Daily might have accidentally leaked the truth out, the newspaper revised the article.

Revised sentence: 1月14日，夏思思接触并负责了一位病人，没想到，就在这个接触过程中，她被感染了。(On January 14, Xi Sisi was in contact with and in charge of a patient; but unexpectedly, she was infected during the contact.)

Original sentence: 1月14日，夏思思接触并负责的一位病人于当天下午确诊为新冠肺炎。(On January 14, in the afternoon, a patient that Xi Sisi was in contact with and in charge of was confirmed to have the novel Coronavirus infection.) Continue reading →

Caixin reported that researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the South China Agricultural University, and the Chinese Institute of Brain Science found that the Wuhan Seafood Market is not where the the novel coronavirus originally started. The virus was transmitted to the seafood market and then the crowded market helped spread the virus.

The research also found that the first spread was on December 8, 2019, which indicated that the virus started transmission among people in early December or even late November.

The Paper also reported this research result.

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