Medics working in a coronavirus field hospital in Wuhan, China, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo conceded Thursday that models calculating Covid-19 mortality rates and how long the pandemic will last are partly-based on disputed statistics from the Chinese government (Credits: AP)

Models which calculate the mortality rate of coronavirus and time the pandemic will last are partly-based on disputed figures from the Chinese city of Wuhan, a top politician admitted.

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that calculations used to try and get a handle on Covid-19 across the US and rest of the world may have been skewed by lies from the Chinese government.

US intelligence sources said Wednesday that the state’s communist government dramatically underreported the amount of people killed by coronavirus in China. They refused to share how much they think China ‘intentionally underreported’ its deaths, with some analysts saying the actual death toll likely to be over 42,000 – rather than the official figure of 3,318.



Governor Cuomo said: ‘We review the models, but we don’t do the models. ‘The modelers will tell you they use Wuhan data, especially when they are trying to calibrate the rate of spread and effect of social isolation.


Governor Cuomo conceded on Thursday that models predicting the pandemic in the US could be based on flawed figures (Picture: Reuters)

‘But they also have a lot of data post-China that they rely on – South Korea, Italy –

if the China data was wrong, might it influence the model, yes, but it isn’t solely dependent on that data either.’

Cuomo says that he and other officials are currently working on a model devised by Bill Gates that Covid-19 will kill around 100,000 people in the US, with 16,000 of those deaths happening across New York itself.

China, which has a population of 1.4 billion people, claims to have suffered just over 81,000 infections, most of them in the city of Wuhan.

Meanwhile, the United States, which has a population of 330 million people, has so far seen 220,000 coronavirus diagnoses, with experts warning that the outbreak is still weeks off hitting its peak.

Spain, which has a population of 46 million and Italy, with 60 million people, have both overtaken China in terms of coronavirus diagnoses and deaths.

Governor Cuomo added that it was a ‘cruel irony’ that he and other officials are now scrambling to buy ventilators and protective equipment for hospital staff from China.