The likelihood that the Chinese government is hiding the real number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the People’s Republic could spur U.S. industries to dial down their dependency on China for medicine, electronics and other products, experts tell the Herald.
There’s an overwhelming skepticism about China’s reported 82,000 coronavirus cases and 3,300 deaths, in a nation of 1.5 billion people. Chinese leaders have claimed coronavirus is only a problem in Wuhan and the Hubei province, which many experts doubt.
The highly contagious disease started there late last year and cases surged before the numbers suddenly halted at around 80,000 cases. Then any new cases trickling in were called “imported” cases from other countries.
“They have obviously been lying,” said American Enterprise Institute’s Derek Scissors. “We don’t know the spread, we don’t know the mortality rate. We don’t know what the hell happened in China.”
“We know the government has a history of manipulating data. This is not new in China,” said Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “There are so many instances of the government lying about statistics, so it’s hard to believe this time would be different.”
Distrust of China’s numbers will put more “impetus” on American businesses to move production out of China, said Scott Harold of the RAND Corporation. He noted that has been the push from Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, Peter Navarro.
U.S. companies in the long term will want to pull out of China, Scissors said.
“With the lack of transparency, you will have companies saying they don’t want to have key supply chains running there any longer,” he said, noting this will be the case especially for pharmaceuticals.
“But there’s no magic wand,” Scissors added. “If it was easy to leave China, they would have done so already. Companies are there for a reason.”
Reliance on China will go down, predicts Professor Nada Sanders of Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business.
“That’s a good thing because we should not be reliant on any one source of supply,” she said. “There are risks involved with one source, whether it’s coronavirus or if an earthquake happens. For sound supply chains, the key is to have a diversified source of supply.”
