President Donald Trump cast doubt about China’s coronavirus numbers as well as those of other countries during the press briefing on White House. As Dr. Deborah Birx was speaking, she presented a chart that showed the mortality rate of the United States in comparison to that of other countries that are severely affected by the pandemic. The chart showed the number of deaths per 100,000 of the population. The President interrupted Dr. Birx at one point to point at China’s numbers on the chart and then said, “does anybody really believe that number?” He also cast doubt about Iran’s numbers.

Dr. Birx seems to agree about what the President is saying, although she did not specifically call out China and Iran. She stressed the importance of reporting the right numbers, and then she praised France and Italy because those two countries actually gave the United States accurate numbers of their cases, which gave the United States valuable information to prepare for the pandemic.

She stressed that there is really no excuse not to share valuable information about the pandemic and said that when one is the first country to suffer from a pandemic, it has to report information so that others can prepare for it in the right way.

As if confirming the fears that China is not reporting accurate numbers when it comes to the coronavirus, the city of Wuhan revised its death count in connection with the COVID-19. They gave some excuse about being unable to report all the deaths initially. The change increases their mortality rate by 50%.

China also made revisions to the way it was reporting its numbers during the height of the pandemic, so its numbers are virtually useless in determining how deadly the disease really is. Even now, there is reason to believe that the official numbers they are giving are quite different from the actual rate of infection and death that they have suffered.

This uncertainty is giving rise to conspiracy theories that China may have suffered way worse than what it has reported. Some are speculating that the more than 20 million cellular phone numbers that have been canceled are proof that millions have died within the country and that it is doing a massive cover-up of hiding the deaths from the rest of the world, just as it tried to hide the true extent of the pandemic initially.