Mumbai, April 2 The United States’ Republicans in Congress accused China of under reporting the numbers of cases and fatalities caused due to the novel coronavirus. Republicans cited a Bloomberg report that had quoted US intelligence, Agence France Presse reported.

According to the Bloomberg report, China’s data were intentionally incomplete, while some experts also claimed it to be fake. China has publicly reported 82,361 confirmed cases and 3,316 deaths as of Wednesday, according to a rolling tracker by Johns Hopkins University.

That compares to 2,06,207 cases and 4,542 deaths in the United States, the country with the world's largest reported outbreak.

‘Not a trustworthy partner’

Republican Senator Ben Sasse attacked Beijing's numbers as “garbage propaganda”. “The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Sasse said in a statement cited in the AFP report.

“Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.”

Responding to Bloomberg ’s report, Michael McCaul, top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said China is “not a trustworthy partner” in the fight against Covid-19.

“They lied to the world about the human-to-human transmission of the virus, silenced doctors and journalists who tried to report the truth, and are now apparently hiding the accurate number of people impacted by this disease,” McCaul said.

He and other lawmakers have called on the State Department to launch an investigation into what he called China's "cover-up" of the pandemic, AFP report added.

On Tuesday, doctor Deborah Birx, a member of Trump's coronavirus task force, said the medical community saw China's outbreak as "serious but smaller than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data."

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