“Some US officials just want to shift the blame”, China’s foreign ministry said Thursday, in response to reports that US intelligence informed the White House last week of Beijing’s alleged efforts to understate coronavirus infections and fatalities.
Predictably, Beijing dispatched Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman with a flair for the dramatic, to handle the accusations.
“Actually we don’t want to fall into an argument with them, but faced with such repeated moral slander, I feel compelled to take some time and clarify the truth again”, she snapped, adding that “China has been open and transparent”.
“Actually”, Hua is always ready to “fall into an argument” with anybody who takes it upon themselves to “slander” her country. Over the course of the trade war, and especially during the Hong Kong protests, Hua unleashed a torrent of hyperbolic vitriol aimed at the US during daily briefings.
“Can anyone tell us what the US has done in the following two months?”, she asked on Thursday, referencing what Beijing is apparently prepared to characterize as a lackluster response to the worsening pandemic, after Donald Trump initially banned travelers from China two months ago.
Trump on Wednesday suggested he had received no such briefing on underreporting but did quip that “[China’s] numbers seem a little bit on the light side”.
“I’m being nice when I say that”, he added, for emphasis. “As to whether or not their numbers are accurate… I’m not an accountant from China”.
The US is closing in on a quarter million cases. New York alone has more infections than all but two other countries, globally.
Mike Pence – a vocal and sometimes abrasive critic of Chinese policies – told CNN that Beijing knew about the virus “long before” the world got wind of the situation in December.
“The reality is that China’s been more transparent with respect to the coronavirus than certainly they were for other infectious diseases over the last 15 years”, the vice president mused. “But what appears evident now is long before the world learned in December, China was dealing with this, maybe as much as a month earlier than that.”
US lawmakers have also questioned the veracity of China’s reporting, going so far as to flatly say that officials in Beijing are surely lying and will continue to do so in order to ensure political stability.
For her part, Hua ramped up the rhetoric once she got warmed up. “These comments by those US politicians are just shameless and morally repulsive, and these slanders, smears and blame games cannot make up for the lost time, but will only cost more lost time and lives”, she sneered.
That much, at least, is true.
USA can not set up factories for critical products/ medicines fast enough and should remove Chinese students(spies) from US universities now.
This is or will very quickly become WW III.
Whoa Nelly. This is not a nationalist group.
Regardless of politics, for the first time scientists the world over are collaborating in real time to develop a vaccine or a treatment for this virus. Could just as easily be Chinese student scientists that come up with it.
It’s pretty clear China’s initial response was to try to keep it quiet and if the numbers are completely accurate I would be shocked but none of that changes the fact we found out about it in December and the president was briefed soon after and we still are throwing out half measures months too late. The administration has and is completely failing to address the issue. If China had to quarantine a province and South Korea had to rapidly deploy testing and tracking… how exactly did anyone suspect we could do neither?!
I think this is correct. The Chinese could have done a much better job communicating the true situation to the world. They didn’t, not of malice, in my opinion, but because the Communist playbook 100 years later is still the same–present the world a better situation than reality regardless of the cost.
That being said, this isn’t the Soviet Union circa 1977. Everyone knew this was going to eventually be a problem in the States and we were woefully underprepared. Combining that with a joke of national leadership and you get this.
I suspect that when the disease first appeared it took the Chinese a few weeks to fully comprehend what it had. It would be the same no matter where it started. I don’t think the Chinese really did that bad in telling the world there was a serious problem developing. Trump really dropped the ball for the US and has failed miserably in getting up to speed. Wait until next week when the US runs out of ventilators and the death toll rises dramatically from 1 or 2 percent to Italy’s 10 or 11 percent.
Italy testing is quite limited (10.000 test per day) so the number of cases is pretty meaningless. Death toll ratio cannot be calculated, so far. You could perhaps compare the number of hospitalized to deaths, considering also that death follows hospitalization with a 4-5 days delay. This ratio is less than 3%.
Chinese people knew that some of the Hubei officers are dumb-ass. Dumb-ass all got replaced, happy to see that. 2. The number reported everyday maybe not 100 percent accurate, but it is REAL. 3. People go back to work almost 1 and half month till now and Hubei’s are back. Few cases reported everyday now and it is safe to go everywhere, just have to wear a face mask. 4. Everybody keep staying at home for 4 weeks of this Chinese New Year. Everyone wear a face mask in public. Buy everything online and stay offline at home.