Britain removes China's data from daily COVID briefings amid suspicions over 'inaccurate' figures
Britain has removed China from the list of countries it uses to compare the spread of the coronavirus amid suspicions that Beijing vastly downplayed the scale of outbreak in the Asian country.
As reported by Ewan Somerville in The Evening Standard, until Thursday the government's daily briefings showed China on charts detailing cases and deaths in other countries comparing them to those in the UK. China's figures have since then disappeared from 10 Downing briefings.
Citing a study by experts at Hong Kong University, published in the online journal The Lancet this week, the media reported further that more than 232,000 people may have tested positive - four times higher than official figures - in the Communist country's first wave of infections.
Some Conservative MPs fear that the inaccurate figures could send the UK's response to the virus off track and have set up a China Research Group to "promote debate and fresh thinking" over Britain's relationship with China.
Tom Tugendhat, the founder of the group and chairman of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, said: "This data is used to judge the effectiveness of our own response, whether good or bad. It's important we are comparing like with like, otherwise our own responses could be distorted leading to more deaths in the UK.
"Clearly No 10 believes the same as the rest of the world -- that China's data is unreliable and possibly false," the lawmaker was quoted as saying.
The new group, modelled on the pro-Brexit European Research Group that scrutinised former British prime minister Theresa May's fated Brexit deal, will assess China's handling of the outbreak and broader security concerns.
"There's no point taking back control from Brussels and handing it to Beijing," Tugendhat said further.
Last week Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the pandemic began, retrospectively upscaled its fatalities by 50 per cent.
It comes after US President Donald Trump halted funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO), accusing it of being 'China-centric' for trusting figures compiled by Chinese Communist Party officials, which he claims have tried to cover up the deadly contagion.
A Number 10 spokeswoman said: "The data on China has been removed from the daily press conference slide used to compare the number of deaths from coronavirus internationally.
"This is because a significant revision to China's data on April 17 means we are unable to compare their daily death rates with other countries, as we do not know when deaths occurred."
Britain has the fifth-highest official coronavirus death toll in the world, after the US, Italy, Spain and France. The death toll reached 20,319 on Saturday after 813 new hospital deaths were recorded. However, China, which more than three months ago, reported its first death from COVID-19, now it says it has gone 10 days in a row without any reported deaths.
(ANI)
