Bloomberg News reports that the US intelligence community has concluded that China is “intentionally” hiding the true numbers of its coronavirus cases and fatalities — a fact that should surprise no one, and is yet another way Beijing has made the pandemic a bigger problem for the rest of the world.
If Beijing had reported the true size of the outbreak there, public-health experts would’ve been sounding much louder alarms at the start — and the rest of the world would have begun making much greater preparations, sooner.
COVID-19 has claimed at least 42,000 lives worldwide. A University of Southampton study estimates 95 percent of infections would have been avoided if China had acted just three weeks earlier — instead of silencing those who sought to save lives.
Plenty of evidence suggests the US intel report is right. A Radio Free Asia analysis, for example, found Wuhan’s official death toll of 2,535 may be understated by a factor of 20. It reported seven mortuaries were handing families 500 funeral urns a day for well over a week. One took shipment of 5,000 urns in just two days.
Beijing has a lot to answer for — but all its answers will be lies, too.
