What do you think they did with the 21 million bodies?
"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 . . . since Feb. 16."
In this case, I'd also consider the source. The Epoch Times is heavily invested in making the CCP look as bad as possible. It's a Falun Gong mouthpiece.
In this case, for instance, there's the assumption that new number = new cellphone. But no mention of the fact that the basic fee per month is only 50RMB and that a new number just means a different SIM card. Literally been there, done that. A gigantic pain in the ass as a foreigner, but still cheap and once you have the SIM card, easy to have multiple numbers with a single cellphone.
If you go to the actual Epoch Times article, it states that:
Quote
The number of cellphone users decreased from 1.600957 billion to 1.579927 billion, a drop of 21.03 million. The number of landline users decreased from 190.83 million to 189.99 million, a drop of 840,000.
The entire population of the country is only 1.4 billion. So it's a verifiable fact that there's a lot of multiple numbers per person going on. Dropping an unnecessary number and saving 50RMB a month when you're lowly paid and not working? Kind of a no-brainer, right?
On the other hand, 40 portable crematoria in Hubei working 24 hours a day since February 16 would be needed if the body count was in the hundreds of thousands.