After avoiding the clear proof of China’s mishandling, if not outright wrongdoing, handling the coronavirus outbreak, CNN finally releases a report pointing out the Middle Kingdom’s understating the COVID-19 outbreak.

Citing almost 120 documents obtained by the network from the Hubei Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, CNN confirms that the Chinese Communist Party intentionally concealed information necessary to helping contain the spread of the coronavirus. From the article:

“In a report marked “internal document, please keep confidential,” local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories. This larger figure was never fully revealed at that time, as China’s accounting system seemed, in the tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the outbreak.”

The previously undisclosed figure is among a string of revelations contained within 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, shared with and verified by CNN.

Taken together, the documents amount to the most significant leak from inside China since the beginning of the pandemic and provide the first clear window into what local authorities knew internally and when.”

The documents also reveal that an examination of testing kits discovered they were ineffective in detecting COVID-19 and the virus was originally considered an influenza. Regular readers of this website will find none of these findings surprising, as opposed to regular viewers of CNN who will.

None the less, this could be a way for CNN to eat crow, a cynical attempt by the network to regain some footing by trying to signal they’re willing to conduct real journalism now that Donald Trump is, (in their minds) no longer president, or that the network is faced with the possibility of being sold. Regardless of the reasons, the network has baked in its reputation as being an outlet of fake news.