US Intelligence Report Accuses China Of Deliberately Underreporting COVID-19 Infection Numbers

A day after China reported more than 1,500 additional “asymptomatic” cases that authorities said had been left out of the country’s data, while promising to start reporting these cases (they’ve already reported 50 more on Wednesday, blaming most of them on travel) going forward, an intelligence report has been submitted to the White House accusing Beijing of deliberately underreporting cases.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as it was widely speculated during the early phases of the outbreak. But this is the first indication that US intelligence has been taking Beijing’s deceptions seriously.

Here’s the Bloomberg 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.

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