tencent leaked some info
According to the report, late
on Saturday evening, Tencent, on its webpage titled "Epidemic Situation Tracker", showed confirmed cases of novel coronavirus (2019nCoV) in China as standing at
154,023, 10 times the official figure at the time. It listed the number of suspected cases as 79,808, four times the official figure.
And while the number of cured cases was only 269, well below the official number that day of 300, most ominously,
the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day.
Tencent screengrab as of late Feb 1, showing far higher infections.
Moments later, Tencent updated the numbers to reflect the government's "official" numbers that day.
Screengrab showing higher numbers (left), chart showing "official" numbers (right). (Internet image)
This was not the first time Tencent has done this: as Taiwan Times notes, Chinese netizens have noticed that
Tencent has on at least three occasions posted extremely high numbers, only to quickly lower them to government-approved statistics.
This is where it gets even more bizarre: contrary to claiming that this was just a "fat finger" mistyping of data, observant Chinese netizens also noticed that
each time the screen with the large numbers appears, it shows a comparison with the previous day's data which demonstrates a "reasonable" incremental increase, much like comparisons of official numbers.
This led many in the mainland to speculate that Tencent has two sets of data, the real data and "processed" data.
In short, two camps have emerged: one, the more optimistic, speculates that a coding problem could be causing the real "internal" data to accidentally appear. The other, far more pessimistically inclined, believes that someone behind the scenes is trying to leak the real numbers, as "the "internal" data held by Beijing may not reflect the true extent of the epidemic."