China’s Real Number of COVID-19 Deaths and Mobile Carrier Users
A Brief Analysis of Telecom Service Subscriptions since the COVID-19 Outbreak
Spoiler alert: China lost a total of 21,073,000 mobile subscriptions between December 2019 and February 2020.
Media all around the globe keeps ranking the number of COVID-19 deaths against China’s official numbers. I could not help but crunch the numbers to better understand how a country the size of China had no more than 3,304 deaths.
In the World’s Press Freedom Index(2019) China ranked 177 out of 180. The current Chinese Government is heavily criticised for its lack of transparency and freedom of speech. Needless to mention, there exists censorship and the media is tightly controlled. These premises alone cast a dark shadow of doubt over the official death toll and the number of confirmed cases.
Let’s add to that the fact that China is a country with one of the highest number of domestic travellers and that the country hid the outbreak of this virus for more than 6 weeks.
How then is it possible that the cradle of this pandemic had fewer cases than countries in Europe in a much shorter period?
Let’s go through some numbers
China has three state-run businesses in the telecom industry: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile. We will analyse their monthly reports from 2016 until February 2020:
First, we will have a look at the broadband (or land-line) subscription volume. According to the figures, each company has experienced a fluctuation in their volumes. Phenomena like user migration can be seen from China Unicom to the other two companies. However, if we observe the total volume we see a plateau at the end of the curve. This could indicate a saturation in the market.
Since the broadband subscription volume remains constant in the period we are studying, we will focus our efforts on analysing the variation in mobile subscriptions.
Mobile subscriptions
According to the monthly reports of the three Chinese carriers and by simply comparing the subscription volumes between December 2019 and February 2020 we find:
The total loss of subscriptions was 21,073,000.
Quite a shocking number considering the user trends in China and their constantly growing internet traffic. Besides, Cisco estimates that China will surpass the 2 billion mobile-connected devices by 2021.
The sudden drop in mobile subscriptions
Below, we have each operator’s mobile subscriptions. Starting in 2016, until last month, February 2020.
The first hypothesis we could think of is migration. When all the carriers are losing subscriptions the hypothesis is invalid. If we focus on the last three months (December 2019 to February 2020) we observe that the number of subscriptions drops for all three carriers. Consequently, the total number of subscriptions also drops significantly.
Mobile subscriptions per person
According to NewZoo’s Global Mobile Market Report (2019), China had a smartphone penetration of 59.9%.
The population in China is 1.44 billion inhabitants. A penetration of 59.9% means a user base of 859.57 million. With a tally of 1.6 billion mobile subscriptions in December 2019, we find a ratio of 1.87 mobile subscriptions per user.
Where are these users going?
Let’s have a look at some factors which influence this tally. We will count five components that may have changed the mobile user base:
- All foreigners in China fled to their home countries:
- Expats in China: 600,000 foreigners live in China. This does not consider other medium or long term foreigners in China. For instance, exchange students. To make it more realistic we will count 1.5 million foreigners. - All Taiwanese went back to the island:
- 1 million Taiwanese live in China. - Migrant workers. China’s migrant workforce corresponds to over 35% of the total workforce, totalling 288 million migrant workers.
- 26% of them (74.88 million)are inter-province migrants who often hire mobile phone plans in two regions simultaneously (where they work and where they are from) — Event hough, mobile carriers in China usually work nation-wide, we will assume all of them opted to have two lines.
- If 15% of them cancelled their plan 11.23 million lines would be lost (one per worker). - Unemployment peak due to the virus outbreak:
- About 5 million jobs were lost in this period.
We will take a generous 50% of these jobs and count them as positions where a mobile subscription is associated with the job. For example, a manager. 50% of 5 million: 2.5 million. - Naturally, we will count the COVID-19 deaths:
- According to the official reports: 3,304 deaths.
We will make the following assumptions:
- Components 1, 2 and 5 cancel all their mobile subscriptions.
- Components 3 and 4 will cancel one mobile subscription (work phone).
By adding up all these people — that we agreed on treating as smartphone users — we can see how many clients the Telecom Carriers lost in the past months. We also know the average mobile subscriptions per smartphone user (1.87), therefore, we can reach the number of subscriptions that they lost
We see how more than 16 million people would end their mobile plans in China. This is just an estimation assuming all smartphone users with at least 1.87 lines each. Of course, this is an optimistic scenario, since the majority of deaths happen among the elder of the population and most do not even have one mobile subscription.
Before we jump into any conclusions, there is not an equivalence of one subscription to one person.
With this estimation, we can trace the cause of 18,413,178 of these subscription losses.
What about the rest?
Even with a generous assumption like this one, we cease to reach the total of lost mobile subscriptions. Furthermore, if these mobile subscriptions follow the average distribution per user (1.87 lines per user), we would still be missing an explanation for over 1.42 million users.
Does it mean that COVID-19 caused over 1.4 million deaths in China?
Let’s hope it doesn’t.
Conclusion
I am not the one to teach critical thinking. We are all adults here to consider what to believe and what not to. Even this article is written under my point of view.
I hope this sheds light upon the incredibly high rates of infection we are experiencing in Europe (and in the past days also in the US). We were not ready for such an outbreak after the official reports coming from China.
Unfortunately, if the missing users are connected to COVID-19 fatalities it could mean that the worst is yet to come. That this is more severe than we could have ever imagined. We need to take it seriously.
We are not losing subscribers here; we are talking about human lives.
Stay safe.
#StayHome. Practice #SocialDistancing
