After an intelligence report suggested that China is actually hiding Coronavirus facts from the whole world, US President Donald Trump finally cast his apprehensions on Wednesday, April 1 over the accuracy of official China COVID-19 figures.
During the White House briefing, President Trump said "how do we know" if China is providing accurate information as "their numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side."
US-China Coronavirus blame game
While Trump administration was criticized for poor tackling of the Coronavirus situation during the initial stage, China has been accused of covering up the whole pandemic from the beginning.
Recently, after as questions surged on China's accounting of the infectious disease, the Asian country said that more than 1,500 people who were infected with the Novel Coronavirus haven't shown symptoms and hence, excluded from its national tally of confirmed cases.
US intelligence officials revealed that as per a classified report when coronavirus cases have jumped in recent days, China misled the world by under-reporting its numbers of patients and deaths.
Coronavirus cover-up: China under scrutiny
After the classified report was presented in White House, Republicans in Congress expressed outrage that Beijing apparently put the world in jeopardy and misled the international community on its infections and deaths that began in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
As of Thursday, China has publicly reported 82,394 cases and over 3,300 deaths, while globally the infection cases reached to 938,373 and the death toll is about to hit 50,000.
Republican Senator Ben Sasse attacked China while addressing Beijing's numbers as "garbage propaganda." In a statement, he said "The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false. Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime."
Michael McCaul, top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the Asian country is "not a trustworthy partner" when it comes to fight against COVID-19. In addition, McCaul mentioned that China lied to the world about the human-to-human transmission of the virus and "Silenced doctors and journalists who tried to report the truth, and are now apparently hiding the accurate number of people impacted by this disease."
Besides McCaul, other US lawmakers too urged the State Department to launch an investigation into what is called China's "cover-up" of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Deborah Birx, a member of Trump's coronavirus task force said the medical community saw China's outbreak as "serious but smaller than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data."
However, here it should be mentioned that China announced on March 19 that over 21 million cell phone accounts were cancelled while in past three months 840,000 landlines were closed in a country like China where people can't live without technology, which gives an idea that probably most of these closed numbers belonged to the people who died due to the disease.
Tang Jingyuan, a US-based China Affairs commentator told The Epoch:
The digitization level is very high in China. People can't survive without a cell phone. Dealing with the government for pensions and social security, buying train tickets, shopping... no matter what people want to do, they are required to use cell phones.
The Chinese regime requires all Chinese use their cell phones to generate a health code. Only with a green health code are Chinese allowed to move in China now.
It's impossible for a person to cancel his cell phone.
