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Washington:China has concealed the extent of its coronavirus outbreak, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it has suffered from the disease, the US intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three US officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they 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.
US President Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence have been pushing China to reveal more about the outbreak.CREDIT:AP
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 3300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4000 deaths in the US, which now has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.
Communications staff at the White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
"The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming," Vice-President Mike Pence said Wednesday, local time, on CNN. "What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China."
A train attendant stands on a train to Wuhan, the epicentre of the global outbreak, at a railway station in Beijing on Sunday.CREDIT:EPA/AP
While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations,there has been considerable scepticism toward its 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 adding more than 1500 asymptomatic cases to its total.
Britain's Prince Charles, who has recovered from coronavirus, praised in a video message the selfless devotion of healthcare workers
Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.
Republican lawmakers in the US have been particularly harsh about China’s role in the outbreak. Enhancing Beijing’s role in the pandemic could be politically helpful to US President Donald Trump, who has sought to shift blame for the US outbreak away from his administration’s delays in achieving widespread testing for the virus and mobilising greater production of supplies such as face masks and hospital ventilators.
“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, said in a statement after Bloomberg News published its report. “Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.”
Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said on 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. “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.”
China isn’t the only country with suspect public reporting. Western officials have pointed to Iran, Russia,Indonesiaand especiallyNorth Korea, which has not reported a single case of the disease, as probable under-counts. Others including Saudi Arabia and Egypt may also be playing down their numbers.
US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has publicly urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks. He has repeatedly accused China of covering up the extent of the problem and being slow to share information, especially in the weeks after the virus first emerged, and blocking offers of help from American experts.
“This data set matters,” he said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. The development of medical therapies and public-health measures to combat the virus “so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired,” he said.
“I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information,” he said. “We’re doing that.”
A county in central China with a population of about 600,000 people went into a partial lockdown on Wednesday following several new infections, including at least two asymptomatic cases.
Jia county in Henan province barred all outbound movement of people without proper authorisation and forbade residents from leaving their homes for work unless they have clearance to do so.
Henan lies north of Hubei province, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in China.
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