According to sources in the U.S. intelligence community, China is lying about the number of cases and deaths the country has suffered from the COVID-19 coronavirus.
It is easy to suspect funniness in China’s COVID-19 reporting. Look for instance at the map of China’s biggest cities below. There are 14 cities in China around the size of New York City, or larger. Among them, none but Wuhan come anywhere near the number of cases logged in The Big Apple. That’s despite the virus reaching those cities before it came to NYC. (Quick note, the number of cases listed by each city is that of the city’s province, not the city itself. China’s data is being reported at the province level.)
Bloomberg’s Nick Wadhams and Jennifer Jacobs report:
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.
The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.
The White House and Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations, there has been considerable skepticism of China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country. The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total.
Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.
Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said Tuesday that China’s public reporting influenced assumptions elsewhere in the world about the nature of the virus.
“The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”
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