CNN has just breathlessly announced that it has uncovered a “vast trove of leaked documents show[ing] China underreported COVID-19 numbers” and deliberately covered up the seriousness of the epidemic.
The only trouble with CNN’s blockbuster is that it is almost a year old.
The rest of the world has known since February or so that China’s Communist leaders hid the epidemic from the world for as long as they could. After the outbreak began late last year in the city of Wuhan, they silenced their own doctors and blocked visits from outside medical investigators. They lied about the virus to the WHO, and then got the WHO to lie for them. They allowed travelers from China to spread the virus to more than 180 countries at the same time they were putting tens of millions of their own people in quarantine.
Beijing did all this while reporting such ridiculously low numbers of cases and deaths that most credible news organizations were skeptical.
Real journalists, such as those who work at our government-funded Radio Free Asia, started digging. RFA reported at the end of March that the death toll in Wuhan was many times higher than the 2,500 or so that Beijing was claiming at the time. As bodies piled up in the city’s crematoria and truckloads of funeral urns arrived for the ashes of the deceased, they estimated the actual number of coronavirus victims at 46,800.