Via The New York Times: C.I.A. Hunts for Authentic Virus Totals in China, Dismissing Government Tallies. Excerpt and then a comment:
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. has been warning the White House since at least early February that China has vastly understated its coronavirus infections and that its count could not be relied upon as the United States compiles predictive models to fight the virus, according to current and former intelligence officials.
The intelligence briefings in recent weeks, based at least in part on information from C.I.A. assets in China, played an important role in President Trump’s negotiation on Thursday of an apparent détente with President Xi Jinping of China. Since then, both countries have ratcheted back criticism of each other.
Obtaining a more accurate count of the Chinese rate of infection and deaths from the virus has worldwide public health implications at a time of grave uncertainty over the virus, its speed of transmission and other fundamental questions. For American officials, the totals are critical to getting a better understanding of how Covid-19 will affect the United States in the months to come and of the effectiveness of countermeasures like social distancing, according to American intelligence agencies and White House officials.
So far, to the frustration of both the White House and the intelligence community, the agencies have been unable to glean more accurate numbers through their collection efforts.
But American intelligence agencies have concluded that the Chinese government itself does not know the extent of the virus and is as blind as the rest of the world. Midlevel bureaucrats in the city of Wuhan, where the virus originated, and elsewhere in China have been lying about infection rates, testing and death counts, fearful that if they report numbers that are too high they will be punished, lose their position or worse, current and former intelligence officials said.
Bureaucratic misreporting is a chronic problem for any government, but it has grown worse in China as the Communist leadership has taken a more authoritarian turn in recent years under Mr. Xi.
No complete picture of the virus exists anywhere because of factors beyond government suppression, including testing shortages, varying measurement standards and asymptomatic infections that could account for up to one in four coronavirus cases. Iran has obfuscated its struggles with the pandemic. Italy’s death count of more than 13,000, the most worldwide, leaves out people who died outside hospitals. Testing in the United States lags behind other countries.
But since January, White House officials have come to view with skepticism the Chinese tallies in particular and asked the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies to prioritize collection of information on China.
Bloomberg News first reported the C.I.A.’s assessment that China was underreporting its virus diagnoses and deaths. Officials played down a revelation about an intelligence report sent last week to the White House, saying that the C.I.A. has for several weeks told White House officials not to trust the numbers that Beijing was handing to the World Health Organization.
The American intelligence about understated numbers predates recent reporting in the Chinese news media that the death count in Wuhan could be 5,000 or more, double the official number. Intelligence officers have not verified the press reports and have left them out of their reports, according to people briefed on their work.
American officials cautioned that even with their own sourcing, many of the intelligence agencies’ warnings to the White House since the beginning of the outbreak have hewed relatively closely to reports from journalists, who have been aggressively reporting on the coronavirus outbreak in China and the Chinese government’s efforts to suppress reporting about its spread.
Even Chinese governments come and go, and the present Communist dynasty has ruled for a relatively brief 71 years. (The Qing dynasty ruled from 1644 to 1912.) Either the next CPC president or the successor to the CPC altogether may be able and willing to report reliable numbers, but it hardly matters. Like the exact numbers lost to famine in the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, they're irrelevant; China has lost them and so has the world.
And both China and the world must now look to maximizing the number of survivors.
