In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping talks by video with patients and medical workers at the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei Province, Tuesday, March 10, 2020. China’s president visited the center of the global virus outbreak Tuesday as Italy began a sweeping nationwide travel ban and people worldwide braced for the possibility of recession. For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. (Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via AP)

China has been touting that it’s had the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak under control for some time now and even our own American mainstream media parrotted this narrative for as long as China has been saying it. However, there has always been clear evidence that China’s claims are false.

Now, according to Bloomberg, anonymous U.S. officials are confirming this to be the case. A report issued to the White House last week told Bloomberg that the reported death toll has been intentionally fudged by the Chinese government:

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 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. The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.

The false numbers presented by the Chinese are more than just proof that China is willing to lie to other nations in order to feign competency. As Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House said about China’s reporting of the numbers, they influenced other countries about their thinking of the nature of the virus.

“The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious but smaller than anyone expected,” she said at Tuesday’s news conference. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”

Evidence that China was lying has been around for some time. As I reported on Tuesday, Wuhan residents described funeral homes that were working overtime with cremations and handing out urns filled with the ashes of relatives:

Another popular estimate is based on the cremation capacity of the funeral homes, which run a total of 84 furnaces with a capacity over 24 hours of 1,560 urns city-wide, assuming that one cremation takes one hour. This calculation results in an estimated 46,800 deaths. A resident of Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, said most people there now believe that more than 40,000 people died in the city before and during the lockdown.

(READ: Wuhan Residents Give a More Accurate Number of What the Death Toll There Really Is)