Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to Bloomberg, a secret intelligence briefing to the White House claimed that China concealed and is continuing to conceal the true magnitude of the Coronavirus outbreak.

China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says

Nick Wadhams and Jennifer Jacobs
2 April 2020, 01:15 GMT+10 Updated on 2 April 2020, 11:08 GMT+10

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China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.

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“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, said in a statement after Bloomberg News published its report. “Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.”

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Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-concealed-extent-of-virus-outbreak-u-s-intelligence-says

Bloomberg also reports Chinese Coronavirus is starting to strike more young people than expected.

Many New York Coronavirus Patients Are Young, Surprising Doctors

Older patients remain most at risk, but hospitals are being hit with more and more younger cases

By Michelle Fay Cortez and Olivia Carville
2 April 2020, 01:55 GMT+10 Updated on 2 April 2020, 03:18 GMT+10

Younger adults in New York City are being hospitalized with Covid-19 infections at surprisingly high rates, said doctors and other health-care workers treating them, undermining earlier assumptions about who’s most at risk from the new coronavirus. 

New York has more confirmed cases than anywhere else in the U.S., and about 1 in 5 hospitalizations are occurring in people under age 44, according to data released by the city’s health department. Globally, moderate-to-severe cases have occurred in 10% to 15% of adults under age 50, according to the World Health Organization.

On Friday at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital, a previously healthy 32-year-old male patient turned to doctor Kaedrea Jackson and asked: “Am I going to die?”

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Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/coronavirus-in-young-people-ny-patients-skew-younger-some-die

What a surprise; Communists lying about the scale of a problem.

On the positive side, there is an unprecedented effort to find a way of treating this nightmare Chinese disease. Doctors were quick to try out Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine, after dusting off old reports of their effectiveness against SARS and MERS, close relatives of Covid-19. Other approaches, from antibody therapy to the search for a vaccine are being pursued.

We shall beat this thing, if people with the disease can be helped to avoid passing it on. But a lot of lives would have been spared if China had been a little more honest when it counted.