President Trump says China actually has a “far higher” coronavirus death toll after Chinese officials revised data from Wuhan, the pandemic’s epicenter.
“China has just announced a doubling in the number of their deaths from the Invisible Enemy,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “It is far higher than that and far higher than the U.S., not even close!”
On Friday, Chinese authorities admitted to undercounting deaths in Wuhan. Officials statistics were revised upward 50 percent, adding 1,290 deaths to the count, for a total of 3,869.
Chinese data is widely considered unreliable due to pervasive under-reporting by local officials fearful of punishment for recording accurate figures.
White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday he doesn’t “feel confident at all” about Chinese reporting on COVID-19.
Photos of mass shipments of funeral urns to Wuhan, where the outbreak emerged in December, underscored doubts about Chinese government data.
Trump on Tuesday suspended US funding for the World Health Organization, accusing the United Nations body of circulating phony data from China, leaving the world unprepared for the scope of the crisis.
China now recognizes less than 84,000 domestic cases and about 4,600 total deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Six countries report larger outbreaks, led by the US with at least 672,000 cases and almost 34,000 deaths.