President Donald Trump cast doubt on the accuracy of official Chinese figures on its coronavirus outbreak after US lawmakers, citing an intelligence report, accused Beijing of a cover up.
"How do we know" if they are accurate, Trump asked at a press conference. "Their numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side."
China has publicly reported 82,394 confirmed cases and 3,316 deaths as of Thursday, according to a rolling tracker by Johns Hopkins University.That compares to 216,722 cases and 5.137 deaths in the United States, the country with the world's largest reported outbreak.
Earlier,US. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday accused China of spreading disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and urged transparent sharing of crucial data on case numbers and mortality rates.
"We've seen [disinformation campaigns] not only from Iran and Russia, but from China and others as well," Pompeo said, which aim to "avoid responsibility and try and place confusion in the world, confusion about where the virus began."
The disinformation campaigns also are an attempt to muddle "how countries are responding to it and which countries are actually providing assistance throughout the world,"
Asked about the report at a press briefing on Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying didn't directly address it or Trump's comments, but said that "to slander, to discredit, to blame others or to shift responsibility cannot make up the time that has been lost."
"To carry on lying will only waste more time and cause more loss of life," she said, adding that politicians who accused China of concealing information were "shameless and without morality."
“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.
While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations, there has been considerable skepticism toward China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country. The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total.
Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.