BREAKING: China lied about coronavirus cases US intelligence says & Canada’s Sino-servile Liberal Establishment Cried Racism Rather Than Blocking or Testing Travellers from China
: China lied about coronavirus cases US intelligence says
The country has allegedly under-reported the total number of cases and deaths in connection with the virus.
Sam McGriskin Montreal, QC
1st April 2020 2 mins read
China has not revealed the extent to which the coronavirus outbreak has affected the country according to US intelligence. The country has allegedly under-reported the total number of cases and deaths in connection with the virus. Bloomberg News reported that three US officials said information on the subject was released to the White House in a classified report.
The officials did not want to be identified due to the secrecy of the report and did not provide further details on its contents. They did note however, that China intentionally provided incomplete reporting on the number of cases and the overall death toll. According to two of the officials, information in the report says China’s numbers are fake.
One official added that the White House received the report last week.
The outbreak started in Hubei, China in 2019 and data from Johns Hopkins University shows that China has reported around 82,000 cases of the disease and 3,300 deaths. The U.S. has reported 189,000 cases and over 4,000 deaths—the world’s largest publicly reported outbreak.
Skepticism of China’s numbers has grown both inside and outside of the country as several methodologies have been used to count cases. The country did not include asymptomatic people in its counts until only recently. Over 1,500 people without symptoms were added to China’s total on Tuesday.
In Hubei province, people began to doubt the reporting when thousands of urns were stacked outside funeral homes.
In a news conference on Tuesday, State Department immunologist Deborah Birx who is advising on the subject at the White house said, “The medical community made—interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected.”
“Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”
Iran, Indonesia, Russia and particularly North Korea are suspected of similar faulty reporting by Western officials. North Korea has not even reported one case of the disease. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have also been suspected of underreporting.
Michael Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State, has accused China of not revealing the extent of the problem many times.
“This data set matters,” Pompeo said during a news conference on Tuesday. Development of Public health measures and medical therapies used for combating coronavirus “so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired,” he added.
“I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information.”
__________________________________
Chris Selley of The National Post (March 31, 2020) exposes how many of Ottawa’s very deferential to China “experts” were woefully wrong with advice not to close the borders to people coming from the epicentre of the Coronavirus — Red China.
Chris Selley: Official nonsense on masks, travel bans is killing Ottawa’s COVID-19 credibility
When officials say ‘masks don’t work,’ regular people hear, ‘we have a dire shortage of masks for frontline healthcare workers so please give us your masks’
On Saturday, the federal government announced passengers with COVID-19 symptoms would be barred from domestic air and train travel, effective noon on Monday. “It will be important for operators of airlines and trains to ensure that people who are exhibiting symptoms do not board,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters.
Does that make sense? It’s a question Canadians seem to be asking more and more about this country’s coronavirus response. And for governments and public health officials, it’s a dangerous one. All too often, the answer is “no.”
“What about buses?” many asked on social media of Saturday’s announcement. Buses are provincial jurisdiction, the feds noted. “What about ferries?” asked the Canadian Ferry Association. Good question. Ferries are Transport Canada’s business. No answer yet. Mind you, transport operators don’t yet have any guidance on how exactly they’re supposed to “ensure” symptomatic people don’t travel. It doesn’t make much sense.
Furthermore, we have been told over and over again that any measures carriers might implement — temperature sensors, for example — simply don’t work. “The positive predictive value of screening is essentially zero,” the authors of a widely cited 2005 study reported, based on Canadian airports’ experience with thermal scanners during the 2003 SARS outbreak.
One of the authors of that study was Theresa Tam, who is now Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer. She’s the one doling out all the science that Trudeau insists underpins every single decision he and his ministers make: “Our focus every step of the way is doing what (is) necessary at every moment based on the recommendations of experts, based on science and doing what we can to keep Canadians safe,” the prime minister said Monday.
It’s more than a bit awkward — but not as awkward as federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu’s immortal March 13th dismissal of travel restrictions: “Canadians think we can stop this at the border, but what we see is a global pandemic, meaning that border measures actually are highly ineffective and in some cases can create harm.” Five days later, the border slammed shut.
We are to believe all of the positions above were supported by the same scientific experts. That doesn’t make sense. Clearly the experts supported the more lenient measures, and then politics intervened.
Clearly the experts supported the more lenient measures, and then politics intervened
Appearing before the Health Committee on January 29, Tam strongly dismissed the notion even of having all travellers from COVID-19 hot zones self-isolate for 14 days. She warned against “stigmatizing” communities. She very nearly suggested we couldn’t implement travel restrictions even if we wanted to. “Right now… (the World Health Organization) does not recommend travel bans,” she warned the committee. “We are a signatory to the International Health Regulations and we’ll be called to account if we do anything different.”
The WHO still recommends against travel restrictions, even to and from especially affected countries. No one seems to be “calling us to account.”
It could well be that by the time Canadians started calling for travel restrictions, it was already too late to implement useful ones. That’s what research generally concludes. But research also acknowledges the political inevitability of travel crackdowns. They just make too much sense to too many people. Federal ministers and public health officials recklessly undermined themselves by so forcefully rejecting measures that made so much sense to so many people Health Minister Patty Hajdu. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
“Security theatre can be dangerous — but the absence of security theatre can be dangerous too,” Martha Pillinger, an associate at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, wrote in Foreign Policy last month. “Apparent inaction (or insufficient action) erodes trust in public health authorities, which undermines response efforts.”
Indeed, Tam is asking a lot of Canadians to set aside a lot of common sense right now. There is ample evidence that face masks — even homemade ones — can provide significant protection to the uninfected. But Tam warns only of the potential pitfalls: Masks can provide “a false sense of security,” lead to more face-touching or make us forget to wash our hands. “Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial,” she said at her Monday press conference.
That makes sense to a lot of medical professionals. A lot of regular people, however, are pretty sure they know how to wash their hands and not touch their faces. When officials say “masks don’t work,” a lot of regular people hear “we have an inexcusable shortage of masks for frontline healthcare workers so please give us your masks.” When officials say “you don’t need to be tested,” they are likely to hear “we have inexcusably few tests available and not enough lab capacity to process the ones we have.”
Officials recklessly undermined themselves by so forcefully rejecting measures that made so much sense to so many people
On Sunday, Tam sternly advised Canadians against retreating to any “rural properties” they might own. “These places have less capacity to manage COVID-19,” she told reporters in Ottawa. That makes sense, as do concerns about straining off-season supply chains. But let’s say you’ve been extremely careful. You’re symptom free. You pack up a week’s worth of groceries, drive 90 minutes or two hours non-stop to your cottage, camp, farm or chalet, and don’t interact with a single other human being. How dangerous, how irresponsible could that really be? If the cottage is good enough for Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and the kids, who beetled off to Harrington Lake on Sunday, some people might conclude it’s good enough for them.
Public health officials want to prevent people from asking such questions, from making excuses for themselves, in hopes the maximum number of people will take the maximum precautions. They need smart people to forsake relatively low-risk things in order to counterbalance all the dumb people who do high-risk things no matter what they’re told. None of the measures will ever make perfect sense in every single situation. They are calls to collective sacrifice for the greater good. But they can’t keep changing on the fly, with no explanation other than “the experts got more worried overnight,” and remain credible.
On Monday, Trudeau declined even to say he regretted not moving quicker on measures he now insists are essential.
Does that make sense? No, that doesn’t make sense.
.gif)
I don’t say this often, but I think the Trudeau government deserves some praise for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic this week. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, in particular, has been impressive in setting the record straight and providing a calm and intelligent line of reasoning behind each government decision.
There are, however, some glaring exceptions to this statement. I’m talking about Health Minister Patty Hajdu and her despicable parroting of Chinese Communist Party propaganda during Thursday afternoon’s media briefing.
CTV’s Ian Brown asked the COVID-19 panel to respond to a Bloomberg news story about a classified U.S. intelligence report on China hiding the extent of the coronavirus outbreak by under-reporting the number of cases and deaths.
“China’s numbers are fake,” the report concludes.
“There’s no indication that the data that came out of China in terms of their infection rate and their death rate was falsified in any way,” Hajdu said sternly.
This was a remarkable moment. A top member of Trudeau’s inner circle was ardently defending a communist regime known for grave human rights abuses and lying on the world stage, while tacitly accusing our top ally and most important international partner of spreading false information.
To add insult to injury, when Brown tried to push back with facts, Hajdu lashed out at him, accusing the reporter of “feeding into conspiracy theories.”
Not only was this an autocratic response to a very reasonable question — making the minister look more like a Chinese official than an elected civil servant in a liberal democracy — but Hajdu’s comments are also highly ignorant and in contradiction to known facts.
There have been plenty of indications that the data coming out of China is false, starting with the fact that China has admitted so much.
In mid-February, China was widely criticized for not including individuals who tested positive for coronavirus but were not showing symptoms in official tallies. Last week, the Chinese government finally changed course to include asymptomatic cases — marking the eighth different definition of what constitutes a coronavirus infection in China’s official reporting since the outbreak began in late 2019.
On March 11, a Southampton University study found that had China acted just one, two or three weeks sooner, “cases could have been reduced by 66%, 86% and 95% respectively – significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.”
Instead, China spent the early days arresting doctors and journalists who spoke out about the deadly virus, while adamantly denying human to human transmission.
While there is no free press in China, and the communist regime expelled American journalists on March 17, there have been some independent reports calling China’s numbers into suspicion.
On March 27, a Radio Free Asia report contested the official death toll in Wuhan — a large metropolitan area the size of New York City and ground zero of the coronavirus outbreak.
While China claims the death toll in Wuhan is around 2,500, Radio Free Asia reports that incinerators at the city’s seven funeral homes have been “working around the clock.” They report that families have been given government stipends to cover the cost of cremation in exchange for their silence — “hush money” to keep the truth from the world.
Radio Free Asia estimates the real death toll in Wuhan to be somewhere between 42,000 and 46,800.
China’s evolving narrative and criminal cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak is no doubt to blame for the world’s lack of preparation for this deadly pandemic.
When the world finally navigates through this public health pandemic and resulting economic crisis, the global community must come together to hold China to account for its reprehensible actions that led to untold death and destruction.
China deserves to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and ex-communicated from the global community. We should similarly judge minister Hajdu for her knee-jerk defence of the truly indefensible.
We’re asking readers, like you, to make a contribution in support of True North’s fact-based, independent journalism.
Unlike the mainstream media, True North isn’t getting a government bailout. Instead, we depend on the generosity of Canadians like you.
How can a media outlet be trusted to remain neutral and fair if they’re beneficiaries of a government handout? We don’t think they can.
This is why independent media in Canada is more important than ever. If you’re able, please make a tax-deductible donation to True North today. Thank you so much.