The U.S. intelligence community told the White House in a new report that China’s published data about the number of deaths and infections due to COVID-19 was incomplete.
The White House received a classified report last week about the inaccuracies, three U.S. officials told Bloomberg. Two officials said the conclusion of the report was that the numbers were fake.
Johns Hopkins University’s data shows that China has reported 82,432 coronavirus cases while cases in the U.S. are well above 200,000.
Jennifer Zeng, a Chinese blogger based in New York, had posted the official monthly data released on March 19 which showed decreases in cellphone and landline usage, according to Daiji World.
Zeng suggested that the large drop in numbers alluded to the number of accounts closing due to COVID-19 related deaths.
The number of cellphone users reportedly decreased from 1.600957 billion to 1.579927 billion in February 2020. Landline usage dropped from 190.83 million to 189.99 million.
Zeng also tweeted information on an internal list of people who died during the outbreak.
President Donald Trump said that the numbers reported from Beijing appeared to be on the “light side.” He also mentioned that the U.S. and China are in constant communication at the daily coronavirus briefings in the White House.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo accused China of being slow in revealing their numbers and stated that he wants nations, especially China, to be more transparent about their numbers.
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