- The Chinese government has deliberately underreported the total number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the country, the U.S. intelligence community told the White House, a new report says.
- Bloomberg, citing three U.S. officials, reported Wednesday that the intelligence community said in a classified report that China's public tally of COVID-19 infections and deaths is purposefully incomplete.
- The secret report concludes that China's numbers are fake, two of the officials said, Bloomberg reported. The White House received the report last week, according to the news outlet.
A man wearing a face mask as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus walks past a Communist Party flag along a street in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on March 31, 2020.Noel Celis | AFP | Getty Images
The Chinese government has deliberately underreported the total number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the country, the U.S. intelligence community told the White House, a new report says.
Bloomberg, citing three U.S. officials, reported Wednesday that the intelligence community said in a classified report that China's public tally of COVID-19 infections and deaths is purposefully incomplete.
The secret report concludes that China's numbers are fake, two of the officials told Bloomberg. The White House received the report last week, according to the news outlet.
China has reported 82,361 coronavirus cases, data from Johns Hopkins University shows. That number is about half of the total cases confirmed in the U.S., which has become the country with the highest number of reported infections in the world.
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Neither the White House nor the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., immediately responded to CNBC's requests for comments on Bloomberg's report.
"You don't know what the numbers are in China," President Donald Trump said at a White House press briefing last week.
Read Bloomberg's full report.
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Source: cnbc.com
