Revealed: How China botched it

A trove of newly leaked documents detail how China bungled its handling of the pandemic’s early days — including lowballing COVID-19 data and taking weeks to diagnose new cases, according to a report on Monday.

The 117 pages of internal papers obtained by CNN outline how health officials in Hubei Province, where the virus was first detected, were hampered by chronic underfunding, leading to gaps in staffing and testing equipment.

“It was clear they did make mistakes — and not just mistakes that happen when you’re dealing with a novel virus — also bureaucratic and politically motivated errors in how they handled it,” Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN.

The documents, from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, reveal inconsistencies between what officials knew at the start of the outbreak and what they publicly reported, the report said.

Chinese officials “seemed actually to minimize the impact of the epidemic at any moment in time,” including by not including the number of suspected cases in its total at first, said William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.

A report from Hubei marked “internal document, please keep confidential” shows how local health officials on Feb. 10 reported 5,918 new coronavirus cases — while the publicly reported number was 2,478, according to CNN.

“China had an image to protect internationally, and lower-ranking officials had a clear incentive to underreport — or to show their superiors that they were underreporting — to outside eyes,” said Andrew Mertha, director of the China Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University.

By mid-February, authorities did improve the system and fired top health officials in Hubei who would have been responsible for the reporting, CNN said.

The report notes that the system improved by March 7, with more than 80 percent of new confirmed cases being recorded in the system that same day.

The files show health officials at first didn’t realize the magnitude of the outbreak or that it would evolve into a global crisis.

“They had a massive run on the medical system. They were overwhelmed,” Dali Yang of the Council on Foreign Relations said.

Although the CNN report included specific new details on the botched coronavirus response, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-LI) said, “This isn’t news.”

“The better question for @CNN is why they waited until after the election for their public epiphany that China misled the world about Coronavirus,” Zeldin tweeted.