The United States has concluded that China has lied about its assessment of the new coronavirus, largely undervalued, according to a report by American intelligence relayed on Wednesday by several parliamentarians.
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The Bloomberg agency spoke Wednesday about this confidential report given last week to the White House. Intelligence estimates there that the number of deaths and cases of contamination posted by Beijing are false, intentionally below the reality, affirms the news agency. "The Chinese Communist Party has lied, and will continue to lie about the coronavirus to protect the regime," said Republican Senator Ben Sasse.
"American intelligence has now confirmed what we already knew: China has been concealing the seriousness of this virus for months," added his colleague in the House of Representatives William Timmons. "The world is now paying for their mistakes."
Michael McCaul, a Republican tenor of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also noted, based on the report, that the Chinese authorities had "hidden the true picture of people infected with the disease".
Lack of transparency
The administration of Donald Trump, starting with US Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo, has been very harshly critical of China in recent weeks, saying it has lacked transparency on the scope of the epidemic vis-à-vis the rest of the world. But it had not so far accused Beijing so clearly of lying about its balance sheet.
Tuesday, the coordinator of the crisis unit set up by the White House to fight the pandemic, however, seemed to confirm that the Chinese record was undervalued. "I think the medical community interpreted the Chinese numbers as thinking it was serious, but less than feared, probably, in light of what we now see in Italy and Spain, because we didn't have a significant amount of data, "said Dr. Deborah Birx.
China, where the first patient was officially detected in December, has recorded 3,312 deaths and 81,554 cases, according to figures released. Or less than the United States, where the Covid-19 has so far killed more than 4,600 people and infected more than 209,000 people, according to the Johns Hopkins University count.
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But many experts believe the Chinese data is largely undervalued. They are based in particular on the large number of families who have appeared in recent days to recover funeral urns with the ashes of their loved ones in favor of the lifting of confinement in Wuhan, the cradle of the pandemic.