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Downing Street has removed China from its comparisons of other countries’ responses to coronavirus amid suspicions their figures vastly downplay the scale of the outbreak.

Ministers were showing the nation’s low rate of infections and deaths on its charts in the daily Number 10 press briefings until Thursday, before it disappeared.

A study by experts at Hong Kong University, published in The Lancet this week, suggested more than 232,000 people may have tested positive - four times higher than official figures - in the country’s first wave of infections.

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Some Conservative MPs fear the inaccurate figures could send the UK’s response off track and have set up a China Research Group to “promote debate and fresh thinking” over Britain’s relationship with China.

Tom Tugendhat, its founder 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 new group, modelled on the pro-Brexit European Research Group that scrutinised Theresa May’s fated Brexit deal, will assess China’s handling of the outbreak and broader security concerns.

Mr Tugendhat said: “There’s no point taking back control from Brussels and handing it to Beijing.”

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 tried to cover up the pandemic.

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.”