The C.I.A. has been warning White House officials since at least February that China is understating its coronavirus numbers — an obfuscation that could have profound impact on health experts’ ability to predict how the virus will spread.
American officials have long viewed many figures and reports out of China with suspicion. But the intelligence about China’s undercount of its coronavirus death toll played a role in President Trump’s negotiation last week of an apparent détente with President Xi Jinping of China after weeks of rising tensions over the virus.
The C.I.A. has its own health experts and epidemiologists who work on classified models of the pandemic’s spread, and intelligence officers seek new information to contribute to those models and improve them. But American intelligence agencies have not obtained better numbers about the death toll in China in large measure because the Chinese government itself does not know how damaging the virus has been.
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.
White House officials believe that China is a month or so ahead of the United States in how the pandemic will play out. And obtaining a more accurate view of the coronavirus toll in China could be critical to heading off a second wave of the pandemic.
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