NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Three U.S. officials reported that China under-reported the severity of the country's total cases of coronavirus and the number of fatalities, according to a classified report to the White House from the U.S. intelligence community, Bloomberg reports.
"We just have no way to confirm those numbers reported," National Security Advisor., Robert O'Brien said during a briefing in Washington on Wednesday
The report said that the outbreak began in China's Hubei province in late 2019, but only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, were publicly reported by the country according to Johns Hopkins University.
"The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming," Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday on CNN. "What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.
Eventually, China eventually enforced a strict lockdown within the country but the Bloomberg reports that the Chinese government excluded people without symptoms entirely, and on Tuesday added over 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total while thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province were reported.
On Tuesday, Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said that China's public reporting affected the world's beliefs regarding the virus.
"The medical community made -- interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected," Brix said. "Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain."
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has repeatedly accused China of covering up the severeness of the coronavirus issue and for slowly sharing information publicly. He also urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks.
"This data set matters," Pompeo said. The development of medical therapies and public-health measures to combat the virus "so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired."
"I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information," he said. "We're doing that."
Chinese officials denied allegations after Pompeo's comments according to Geng Shuang, a Chinese foreign-ministry spokesman.
