By Zachary Evans

April 1, 2020 12:02 PM

Security personell wear facemasks at a checkpoint at the Jiujiang Yangtze River Bridge as the country is hit by an outbreak of coronavirus in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, China, February 4, 2020. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

The U.S. Intelligence Community has concluded that China concealed the extent of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in the country, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

A classified report submitted to the White House states that China intentionally lowered its reported number of coronavirus cases, according to three officials familiar with the matter. The officials did not indicate if the report estimates what China’s actual infection rate is.

The news comes a day after Dr. Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, suggested that the U.S. response to the pandemic may not have been as effective as possible due to “missing” data from China.

“The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as, this was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” Birx said at a press briefing. “Because, probably…we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that we see what happened to Italy and we see what happened to Spain.”

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