The CIA has warned the White House since early February that China has vastly understated its coronavirus numbers and those figures should not be relied upon.
American officials were looking at the Chinese figures as they worked on predictive models to fight the coronavirus in the United States.
As the intelligence agency was issuing its warnings, President Donald Trump was praising Chinese President Xi Jinping’s handling of the outbreak.
‘Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China,’ the president wrote on Twitter on February 7th. ‘He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus.’
The CIA has warned the White House since early February that China has vastly understated its coronavirus numbers
The warnings came as President Donald Trump was praising Chinese President Xi Jinping’s handling of the outbreak
But the tone between Washington and Beijing grew more tense as American officials became frustrated with the lack of information out of China.
President Trump began referring to the disease as the ‘Chinese virus’ and both he and Vice President Mike Pence complained the United States could have done more and responded faster had Beijing been more transparent about what was occurring in China.
But those CIA warnings would prove of value.
President Trump used them in his negotiation of a detente with Xi, The New York Times reported, when the two leaders spoke last week – a call that resulted in the ratcheting down of criticism between the countries.
The president, at his daily White House press briefing, acknowledged the Chinese figures on the virus are ‘on the light side.’
‘The numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side, and I’m being nice when I say that, relative to what we witnessed and what was reported, but we discussed that with him,’ Trump said Wednesday of his phone call with Xi.
‘As to whether or not their numbers are accurate,’ he noted, ‘I’m not an accountant from China.’
The lack of accurate figures from China has frustrated American health officials who would like the information to try and predict how the virus might spread throughout the United States.
It would also help them measure the effectiveness of policies such as social distancing.
American intelligence officials have concluded, however, that accurate numbers may never be possible as not even Chinese government is aware of how the disease devastated its country due to the fact midlevel bureaucrats in Wuhan, where the virus originated, and elsewhere in China have been lying about infection rates and death counts out of fear they will be punished if they report too high numbers, The Times reported, citing current and former intelligence officials.
American intelligence officials have concluded that accurate numbers on the coronavirus may never be possible out of China; above medical workers in Wuhan disinfect a stretcher
Specifically, the intelligence community handed over a classified report to the White House last week, an official told Bloomberg News, which concluded that China’s numbers on the virus are fake.
The coronavirus outbreak originated from Wuhan in the Hubei province of China at the end of 2019 – but China has only publicly reported 82,361 cases and 3,293 deaths as of Wednesday.
This would mean China is less impacted by coronavirus than the U.S., Italy and Spain.
So far, according to a Johns Hopkins University of Medicine world tracker of the virus’ impact, there are more than 190,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. and more than 4,000 people have died.
The U.S. has the largest publicly reported outbreak of coronavirus in the world – skyrocketing this week starting over the weekend when deaths doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 in just one day.
‘The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming,’ Vice President Mike Pence said during an interview with CNN Wednesday afternoon, conceding that the nation has been more honest regarding coronavirus than other diseases over the years.
‘I mean the reality is that China’s been more transparent with regard to the coronavirus than certainly they were for other infectious diseases over the last 15 years,’ Pence, who is heading the White House coronavirus task force, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. ‘But 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.’
Intelligence officials conclude China’s reporting is intentionally incomplete – as skepticism already swirled that they were under-cutting death tolls and confirmed cases in not reporting asymptomatic cases
Mike Pence brought up China’s transparency issue in an interview with CNN Wednesday. ‘The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming,’ Pence asserted
Ambassador Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak as part of the task force, said that China’s public reporting influenced how other countries responded to the outbreak.
‘The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,’ she said at the daily coronavirus press briefing Tuesday evening. ‘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.’
Speculation arose over China’s reporting after its government said earlier this month that there were no new cases in Wuhan, where the pandemic stemmed from, and images of stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province showed up.
There have also been questions surrounding China’s ever-changing methodology for counting and reporting its coronavirus cases and deaths.
For weeks, the Chinese government did not count asymptomatic individuals, even if they tested positive – and only on Tuesday added more than 1,5000 asymptomatic cases to its total.
While skepticism continues to swirl over China’s reporting methods, there are concerns from western officials that Iran, Russia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and North Korea, which has not reported any cases, are also under-counting their cases and death tolls.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged during a press conference Tuesday that China and other nations to be honest and transparent about coronavirus outbreaks in their respective countries.
‘This data set matters,’ he said, ‘so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired.’
‘I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information. We’re doing that,’ Pompeo asserted.