The U.S. intelligence community believes the Chinese Communist Party is covering up the true scale of the coronavirus outbreak inside the country where the deadly COVID-19 pandemic originated.
A classified report said Beijing has underreported total cases and deaths associated with the disease, according to three U.S. officials cited by Bloomberg on Wednesday. One of these unnamed officials said the White House received the report last week.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment, but Sen. Ben Sasse, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded to the report.
“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false. 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," the Nebraska Republican said. "Beijing’s garbage propaganda shouldn’t be taken seriously by the World Health Organization, by independent journalists, or by the American epidemiologists who are going to beat this terrible virus."
The U.S. intelligence community has long suspected that China was misleading the world about the novel coronavirus, and on Tuesday, the Chinese government acknowledged that for weeks it had excluded any asymptomatic coronavirus cases from its figures, adding 1,500 cases to its total figures.
As of early Wednesday afternoon, there were more than 885,000 confirmed coronavirus cases around the world and more than 44,216 deaths tied to the infection, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. In the U.S., there were more than 190,000 cases, which have resulted in more than 4,100 deaths. China has reported 82,361 cases and 3,316 deaths, but there is evidence that these numbers are purposely underreported.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, said Tuesday that China’s incomplete coronavirus data likely harmed the world’s ability to respond effectively.
“I think when you look at the China data originally and you said, 'Oh, well, there’s 80 million people — or 20 million people in Wuhan and 80 million people in Hubei,' and they come up with the number of 50,000, you start thinking of this more like SARS than you do this kind of global pandemic,” Birx said. “So I think the medical community interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious but smaller than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data [from China] — now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”
Critics say President Trump for weeks downplayed the coronavirus threat, contributing to a more extensive outbreak in the U.S. and a lack of preparedness.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stressed the importance of having accurate data.
“This data set matters,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “The ability to trust the data that you’re getting so that our scientists and doctors and experts at the World Health Organization and all across the world who are trying to figure out how to remediate this, how to find therapies, how to identify a solution which will ultimately be a vaccine, to determine whether the actions that we’re taking — the social distancing, all the things that we’re doing, limiting transportation, all those things we’re doing — to figure out if they’re working so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired.”
Pompeo said, “This is the reason disinformation is dangerous — it is not because it’s bad politics. It is because it puts lives at risk if we don’t have confidence in the information that’s coming from every country.”
U.S. officials have publicly condemned what they see as Chinese disinformation efforts, including Chinese diplomats disputing the coronavirus’s Chinese origins and blaming it on the U.S. military.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is said to be furious with China, and the Daily Mail reported scientists have told the United Kingdom that China’s coronavirus cases may have been “downplayed by a factor of 15 to 40 times.”
News reports also show China has been misleading about the COVID-19 outbreak.
The World Health Organization tweeted in mid-January that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” But Chinese doctors knew around late December and early January that it was almost certainly occurring, and the Chinese government silenced medical professionals who attempted to make the evidence public.
The WHO concluded the COVID-19 virus first appeared in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China, and an investigative report in February found “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source” in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the existence and spread of the coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, misled the WHO, and attempted to block outside health experts. At least one study indicated that if the Chinese government had acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.
All of this echoes reports that the U.S. intelligence community warned Trump in early 2020 that China’s leadership was downplaying the real threat posed by the novel coronavirus outbreak. The Trump administration was advised in January and February that Chinese officials “appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak” and “were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis,” according to a report in late March by the Washington Post.
The Trump administration announced travel restrictions against China at the end of January. The day of the announcement, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden accused him of “hysterical xenophobia.”
“I wish they could’ve told us earlier about what was going on inside ... because we could’ve come up with a solution,” Trump said of China during a March press briefing. “China was secretive, okay? Very very secretive. And that’s unfortunate. … If we had a two- or three-month difference in time, it would’ve been much better.”
