LEAKED: Documents reveal China’s early mishandling of COVID-19

Early on in the pandemic, President Trump stated his concerns that China was not giving the full story of the impact of the virus on their nation or health care system, and he was roundly dismissed and blamed for the pandemic. These leaked documents show that Trump was correct in his assertion.

In a report marked "internal document, please keep confidential," health authorities in Hubei listed a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10. This is more than double the official public number of confirmed cases at the time. This was part of a larger operation to downplay the severity of the virus.

There are 117 pages of leaked documents confirmed to be from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This is the great source of information to come from the nexus of the virus. Nonetheless, China continues to claim it has been honest since the beginning of the pandemic.

The whistleblower who gave these documents to CNN requested anonymity. They said they worked inside the Chinese healthcare system, and wanted expose a truth that had been censored. Six independent experts have all verified these documents to be original.

Early entries of the leaked document reveal a bureaucratic healthcare system, hindered by its inefficiency. Specifically, it is revealed that the health authorities were incredibly slow in dealing with the virus, with the average time between the onset of symptoms to confirmed diagnosis at 23.3 days.

It was clear they did make mistakes—and not just mistakes that happen when you're dealing with a novel virus—also bureaucratic and politically-motivated errors in how they handled it," said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A revealing part of the documents show that China intentionally reported fewer than half the deaths they saw in that country. Furthermore, it went unreported that six healthcare workers died of the virus. The documents also note that Hubei had a defunded medical system, which greatly burdened the local health authorities.

The documents make no note of the virus being man made, or being made in a lab. The information provided is instead, a validation for many western countries which took the official Chinese numbers with a grain of salt.