"Is China hiding the real COVID-19 death toll? 21 million phones vanished." “中国是不是隐瞒了实际的新冠死亡人数？中国的手机号少了2100万。” "Breaking: Wuhan super virus killed 21 million people in China according to cell phone records."“突发：中国手机号的减少证明武汉超级病毒导致2100万人死亡。” Admittedly, these are some truly sensational headlines. 讲真，这些标题相当的耸人听闻。 So now China has fewer cell phone users, and it was all because those lost users had died from COVID-19, 21 million of them. 中国的手机用户减少了，所以这些用户肯定是已经死于新冠了，一共2100万人。 Well, it’s the kind of disinformation that’s not even worth debunking. But I’ll do it anyway! 说实话，这些无稽之谈真的不值一驳，但我还是反驳一下吧。Fact No.1
事实一
China’s three major cellphone carriers, namely China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, did report a loss of nearly 21 million subscribers in January and February. 中国三大手机运营商, 即中国移动、中国联通和中国电信, 的确在今年一月和二月份流失了大概2100万用户。 That happened when almost the entire country was forced to shut down to stop COVID-19. Throughout China, businesses closed doors and that included the telecom stores. So how can you open up an account with the telecom carriers when there is not an open store to go to? When there were no new users, the overall number looks bad. Simple, right? 在那两个月里，因为要全力阻止新冠病毒传播，整个国家几乎都停滞了。大量商业门店关门停业，包括各家电信网点。如果这些网点都没开门，你怎么能申请新号呢？没有了新增用户，用户总数看起来当然会很糟糕，这个道理很简单，对吧？Fact No. 2
事实二
Remember this outbreak happened during China’s lunar New Year when hundreds of millions were travelling on the road? OK. When businesses stopped and travel restrictions beginning to take effect, people were not able to go back to their workplaces. After a while, stores beginning to shut down and people who worked there decided to cancel the phone numbers they used there to cut costs. Again, easy to understand, right? 疫情发生在中国农历新年期间，当时数以亿计的人都在返乡。当商业限于停顿，旅行又开始受到限制时，人们没办法回到之前的工作单位上班。几周后，一些商铺决定关门歇业。而这些商铺的雇员们也自然会选择注销之前的电话号码来省点电话费。这也不难理解吧？Fact No. 3
事实三
China has been pushing to lower phone bills for quite some time, and guess what? It worked! Fees have been lowered. Some people used to have a data sim card along with a normal sim card to save money on data.But they don’t have to now. So those dual-card users canceled one of the numbers. A bit technical, but not too heavy. 这几年，中国一直在推动电信资费改革，话费也真的降了，之前有些人在普通手机卡之外再用一张流量卡来节省数据费用。但随着资费降低，很多双卡用户注销了其中一个号码。这确实有点复杂，但也可以理解吧？ Or we can do some quick math here.或者让我们简单推算一下。 As of April 2, there are 82,722confirmed cases of coronavirus in China, and 3,321 deaths, meaning a fatality rate of around 4 percent. If-and this is a big if- the 21 million subscribers were killed by COVID-19, and each subscriber is just a single person, there would be over 500 million infected cases in China, that’s nearly a third of the country's population. Does this make any sense? 截至4月2日, 中国有82733例新冠确诊病例, 死亡3321例, 病死率约为4%。假设这2100万手机号的主人都死于新冠，每个手机号对应一个人，那么全国的感染人数超过5亿，差不多占全国人口的三分之一，这么玩儿有意思吗？ So no, lost phone users are not lost lives. 21 million lost phone numbers are not 21 million people dead. There is simply no cause and effect in there.所以，少了多少号码不等于死了多少人。2100万手机号对应的不是2100万条生命。很简单，两者没有因果关系。 Actually, people with China’s telecom carriers were quite baffled when they were asked about the relation between the two and they had to do a little investigation to clear it up. 事实上，中国的电信运营商们在被问到二者关系时也很困惑，搞得他们必须做点调查来澄清事实。 OK, so I’m done debunking this one. Next time, try something more intelligent, please. 先就这样吧，希望下次的有点难度。