Streets are empty. Planes, trains and automobiles motionless. Factories and heavy industrial enterprises like construction projects and building sites shuttered and abandoned. So why is Wuhan suddenly choking on thick smoke that eclipses the worst smog in the city’s history? Locals say mass cremation of coronavirus victims is the source and that the government is burning evidence of a plague.

The pictures are everywhere. The city of Wuhan, China, rendered stone silent and empty as a ghost town by an ordered lockdown and general quarantine, now mysteriously shrouded in thick smoke, despite the shuttering of factories and the idling of all forms of transportation. For Wuhan locals, the explanation is terrifyingly simple. Chinese officials are engaged in a mass cremation operation, burning the bodies of the dead victims of coronavirus both to halt the spread of pathogen, but more valuably, to hide from the world the true scale of the outbreak.

Adding to the unraveling of Chinese government portrayal of an inconsequential outbreak, the purported leaking of statistics by a now silenced Chinese website claiming more than 154,000 people are now confirmed to be infected with coronavirus and more than 24,000 have already died. Figures that if true and authentic, reveal a Chinese government coverup every bit as stinking and foul as the air of Wuhan.

READ MORE: LEAKED FIGURES: 154K INFECTED, 24K DEAD IN CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK