Amid the Coronavirus crisis in China, martial law quarantining of dozens of cities and more than 250-million people is leaving isolated citizens locked inside giant apartment buildings with no access to basic necessities including food as main entrances to their buildings are barricaded and in some cases, welded shut by Chinese military personnel.

An ever growing stream of video and photographs illustrates the desperation of Chinese people cut off from food and unable to replenish supplies crying out for help from balcony windows and in at least one case, taking unthinkable risks in attempts to circumvent the lockdown. A video posted Monday showed a woman in Wuhan attempting the climb down the outside of a 30-story apartment building, only to lose her grip and plunge ten stories or more to the pavement below. Twitter quickly removed the graphic video as a violation of community standards.

It’s unclear why the woman believed she could successfully scale the outside of her building, but it underscores the desperate straits of millions of people trapped in their own homes under enforced isolation and unable to feed themselves. In another video, (below) a woman can be seen and heard banging on an empty kettle, crying and wailing for help from the balcony outside her flat, alternately begging someone to bring her food saying, “We are starving,” and singing a traditional Chinese death song, asking death to be merciful, gentle and peaceful.

China continues to publish infection and fatality statistics from the novel coronavirus outbreak that observers say are drastically distorted to conceal the true scale of the pandemic that has escaped every effort at containment and continues to spread.  On February 2nd, the Chinese health ministry inadvertently posted figures to the official tabulation and information portal of their website that some believe were the most accurate revealed by the Chinese regime. Those figures indicated more than 154,000 infections and 24,000 fatalities as a result of Coronavirus. A population nearly as large as the United States is now under complete lockdown because of the crisis.

In the table above, posted momentarily to the Chinese health ministry website on February 2, before being taken down and replaced with the much lower “official” statistics, the number in red indicates total number of infections. The number in yellow, suspected cases and the number in gray, total deaths attributed to novel coronavirus.