As it turns out, you can’t trust the coronavirus numbers coming out of China. Of course, if you needed a U.S. intelligence report to learn this, you might be a Leftmedia reporter.

Bloomberg broke the dog-bites-man report Wednesday afternoon:

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

President Donald Trump, in the tongue-in-cheek understatement of the year, then mused, “The numbers [coming out of China] seem to be a little bit on the light side — and I am being nice when I say that.”

Bloomberg adds, “The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.”

In reality, China’s death toll is many times higher than reported. As Mark Alexander said back on January 31, “Officially, the communist Chinese government claims about 220 deaths and 10,000 infections. Our sources indicate that the actual rates of infection and deaths in China are much higher, and, in fact, official reports may only represent 5-7% of the actual dead and infected.”

Evidence includes China’s so-called “pop-up hospitals” that were actually isolation morgues, as well as the recent massive shipment of urns to Wuhan.

Asian culture values “saving face” as a chief moral imperative. If that means brazenly lying, so be it. Typical of oppressive authoritarian regimes, the ChiComs have taken that to a whole new level.

Why does this matter? “The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as ‘This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,’” said Dr. Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “We were missing a significant amount of the data.” That incomplete picture informed the West’s response. But if Chinese dictator Xi Jinping had honestly informed the world just three weeks earlier, it could have reduced the contagion’s spread by 95%. Instead, Chinese doctors who try to tell the truth suddenly disappear.

Rather than treat Beijing’s lies with even a fraction of the skepticism devoted to the White House, American Leftmedia outlets have been running Chinese propaganda as news, including parroting obviously fake numbers — primarily in an effort to smear President Trump for not learning from China’s “example.” And organizations like the United Nations and the World Health Organization have likewise made the deadly choice to take Chinese disinformation at face value.

Using Leftmedia logic, the model for the world is apparently Beijing’s puppet regime in North Korea, which still hasn’t reported a single case of COVID-19.

Instead of believing the ChiComs, the U.S. should be sending them the bill.