Chinese coronavirus numbers are inaccurate, U.S. intel says

U.S. intelligence says the number of coronavirus cases and deaths reported by China is inaccurate, with Beijing likely downplaying the size of the outbreak in the country to promote the appearance that authorities there have successfully managed the pandemic.

“There are definitely questions about the accuracy of the information we’re getting from China,” an American source told The Washington Times on condition of anonymity, when asked whether it is believable that China’s outbreak suddenly stopped at roughly 80,000 confirmed cases weeks ago.

The comment came after Bloomberg News reported Wednesday that secret U.S. intelligence community report shared with the White House had concluded that China has concealed the extent of its outbreak by underreporting both total cases and deaths.

While U.S. cases have surged to more than 190,000 in recent weeks, the total reported by China has been essentially stalled during the same period, a phenomena that Chinese officials say is a result of aggressive quarantine restrictions and an effective public health response by Beijing.

The halt in reported Chinese cases has coincided with sharp skepticism from Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has repeatedly accused the Chinese government of withholding information about the virus that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.

U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Deborah L. Birx, a top State Department immunologist advising President Trump on the coronavirus, said Tuesday that the U.S. and other international responses were slower than they should have been to coronavirus because China withheld “significant” data at the start of the pandemic.

While Ms. Birx appeared to be speaking in broad terms — not about a recent or specific case number manipulation by Beijing — she said at a White House news conference that the world’s medical community “interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected.”

The source who spoke on condition of anonymity with The Times on Wednesday would not confirm that a secret U.S. intelligence report on the situation had been compiled or shared with White House officials, but said the overall sentiment that China has concealed the outbreak “doesn’t have to be a classified assessment.”

The Bloomberg News report, meanwhile, said the assessment was shared with the White House last week. The news outlet cited three U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity because it was secret, as saying the thrust of the assessment was that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete.

Two of the officials said the assessment concluded that China’s numbers are fake.

Bloomberg noted that 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 190,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.

The news outlet also noted that 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. At the same time, Bloomberg noted that stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.