China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says
Nick Wadhams and Jennifer
Jacobs
6 hrs ago
© Bloomberg
Airport employees wear full body protective suits at Pudong
International Airport in Shanghai on March 28.
(Bloomberg)
-- 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.
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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.
Communications
staff at 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.”
China
is not the only country with suspect public reporting. Western
officials have pointed to Iran, Russia, Indonesia and especially
North 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
U.S.
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.”
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Bloomberg L.P.
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