French President Emmanuel Macron has become the latest world leader to publicly question China’s coronavirus numbers.

“Given … what China is today, which I respect, let’s not be so naive as to say it’s been much better at handling this,” Macron told the Financial Times. “We don’t know. There are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about.”

The original epicenter of the Covid-19 virus, China has reported just 84,000 confirmed cases and 4,642 deaths, totals that have been easily surpassed by a number of Western countries including France, which has reported 147,000 cases and 18,000 deaths.

France vs. China

Macron’s comments come shortly following a diplomatic kerfuffle between China and France that was sparked by an article published on the Chinese embassy’s website which criticized Western countries for being slow and complacent in their response to the pandemic.

Written by an anonymous Chinese diplomat in Paris, the article even accused caregivers in French nursing homes of “abandoning their posts overnight” and “leaving their residents to die of hunger and disease.”

The article sparked outrage in French society and resulted in the French foreign ministry summoning the Chinese ambassador to Paris for an explanation.

China’s numbers vs. the world

With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc across the globe, China’s relatively modest numbers have been viewed with more and more skepticism.

On Friday, the Wuhan government raised the city’s official death toll by 1,290 to 3,869, blaming issues like hospital overcrowding for the data discrepancies and declaring that the update was being made in the interest of being “open, transparent, and accurate.”

US President Donald Trump wasted no time in celebrating the revision, tweeting that the number of deaths in China is, in actuality, far higher than in his country, which has so far reported more than 35,000 dead.

China has just announced a doubling in the number of their deaths from the Invisible Enemy. It is far higher than that and far higher than the U.S., not even close! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2020