FTA
Analyzing the Numbers
The big question is whether the dramatic drop in cellphone accounts reflects the account closings of those who have died due to the CCP virus.
“It’s possible that some migrant workers had two cellphone numbers before. One is from their hometown, and the other is from the city they work in. In February, they might close the number in the city they work in because they couldn’t go there,” Tang said. Typically, migrant workers would have gone to their home city for the Chinese New Year in January, and then travel restrictions would have prevented them from returning to the city where they held a job.
However, because there is a basic monthly fee to hold a cellphone account in China, the majority of migrant workers—the lowest income group—are likely to only have one cellphone account.
China had 288.36 million migrant workers as of April 2019, according to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics.
On March 17, Meng Wei, spokesman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, said at a monthly press conference in Beijing that except for Hubei, all provinces reported that more than 90 percent of their businesses resumed operations. In Zhejiang, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Shandong, Guangxi, and Chongqing, almost all businesses resumed production.
If both the number of migrant workers and the level of employment are accurate, more than 90 percent of migrant workers have gone back to work.
The economic dislocation caused by shutdowns in China may have also led some people who have an extra cellphone to cancel it. With business poor or stopped, they may not want to carry the extra expense.
“At present, we don’t know the details of the data. If only 10 percent of the cellphone accounts were closed because the users died because of the CCP virus, the death toll would be 2 million,” Tang said.
The reported death toll in China doesn’t line up with what can otherwise be determined about the situation there