As the novel coronavirus cases continue to surge in the United States and Europe, many policy makers are asking, how come China’s numbers did not explode like that?
A classified intelligence report submitted to the White House alleged that China concealed the extent of the outbreak in its country by underreporting the number of cases and deaths.
Bloomberg quoted three unidentified US officials who said that China’s public tally of cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete.
China denied the report, saying this is a “despicable attempt to put political interests above human life.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., said that Beijing “has fully honored its obligation of notification prescribed by the International Health Regulations, and has been updating the statistics of its confirmed and death cases in an open, transparent and responsible manner.”
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has publicly urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks.
The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in December 2019, but China has reported 82,437 coronavirus cases and 3,322 deaths, data from Johns Hopkins University show. The number of confirmed cases is three times less than that in the United States, which has become the country with the highest number of reported infections in the world. More than 245,000 COVID-19 cases have so far been confirmed in the U.S. with deaths nearing 6,000.
While the disease in recent weeks has spread exponentially around the world — especially in parts of the U.S. and Europe — China’s numbers have flattened.
China attributes its apparent success in “flattening the curve” of coronavirus growth to the “comprehensive and stringent measures” it has put in place to fight the pandemic. Those extreme steps reportedly included forcibly holding Wuhan residents in pop-up hospitals, conducting door-to-door health checks and requiring that citizens who showed any symptoms be immediately quarantined.
The total lockdown of daily life seems to have worked, according to China’s numbers.
