China concealed the extent of its coronavirus outbreak, under-reporting total cases and deaths from the pandemic, the American intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing three US officials.
They said that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths was intentionally incomplete, with two going so far as to say China’s numbers were fake.
The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country had publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, which compiles data on worldwide infections and deaths.
That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the US, which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.
China eventually imposed a strict lockdown, but there has been skepticism of China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country, the news service reported.
Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist on the Coronavirus Task Force, 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 press briefing on Tuesday.
“Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that we see what happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”
Vice President Pence on Wednesday blamed China for concealing information when he was pressed on CNN about President Trump’s initial reaction to the pandemic, which he repeatedly downplayed and said would disappear like “a miracle” before taking a grimmer view on Tuesday, when he acknowledged that 150,000 Americans or more could die from the disease.
With Bloomberg
