By looking at the number of cell phone users in the communist country, The Epoch Times concludes that China lied about the death toll caused by the new coronavirus. And we’re not just talking about a factor of 5 either; we’re talking very serious numbers here. Numbers that would explain why Italy is currently losing more than 600 of its citizens per day to the new Chinese virus.

Cell phones are an “indispensable part of life in China,” the newspaper correctly explains. Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based China affairs commentator, even says that “people can’t survive without a cellphone. Dealing with the government for pensions and social security, buying train tickets, shopping… no matter what people want to do, they are required to use cellphones.”

In fact, Jingyan goes on to say, “[t]he Chinese regime requires all Chinese to use their cellphones to generate a health code. Only with a green health code are Chinese allowed to move in China now. It’s impossible for a person to cancel his cellphone.”

So, if you want to live in China, you need a cell phone.

And that’s where it gets interesting:

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced on March 19 the number of phone users in each province in February. Compared with the previous announcement, which was released on Dec. 18, 2019, for November 2019 data, both cellphone and landline users dropped dramatically. In the same period the year before, the number of users increased… According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the country’s population at the end of 2019 was 4.67 million larger than in 2018, reaching 1.40005 billion.

Now, the decrease in landline users may be explained by the nationwide quarantine in February. That’s when small businesses were shut down. But the closure of 21 million cell phones can’t be explained in this way.

Jingyuan explains 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.”

However, migrant workers are the most underpaid income group in China. Chances of millions of them having two cellphones are rather small, especially if we take into account that cell phone accounts require a basic monthly fee. Some may have had, but 21 million? Nah.

“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,” The Epoch Times adds, before concluding that this too doesn’t really explain the difference, especially with 90 percent of small businesses having resumed operations as normal.

“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,” Jingyuan says.

There are two other reasons to believe the death toll is far higher than what China wants us to believe. First, the death rate in Italy, which is spiraling out of control to around 10%. Italy’s approach to the virus has been very similar to that of China. It has had a lockdown in place for some time now, but that has not slowed the virus down much. More than 600 Italians are losing their lives every day due to the virus. It would be rather miraculous if those numbers were much lower in China.

And then there’s this:

Activities in the outbreak epicenter of Hubei Province seem to contradict the reported death toll in China. The seven funeral homes in the city of Wuhan were reported to be burning bodies 24 hours a day, seven days a week in late January. Hubei Province has used 40 mobile cremators, each capable of burning five tons of medical waste and bodies a day, since Feb. 16.

So, who still believes China?

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