EDITORIAL: China's coronavirus lies pile up

A Department of Homeland Security analysis has concluded that China hid the early spread of the coronavirus so it could hoard medical equipment, keeping it from other countries that would have bought it if they had known of the danger that was coming their way from Wuhan.
Specifically, DHS found, with 95% statistical confidence, that changes to China's personal protective equipment import and export behavior were highly abnormal and not random.
Early warnings from China about the scale of the coronavirus outbreak and its threat of becoming a pandemic could have given other countries time to take actions that would have saved lives. It looks like the Chinese government deliberately misled the world so that it could stockpile crucial supplies.
For those of us who have been chronicling China's mendacity on the coronavirus for months, this revelation is not surprising. But it is certainly outrageous.
China's lies are piling up rapidly. It lied about the virus being capable of transmission between humans. It threw whistleblower doctors in prison. It refused to let the World Health Organization and other authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention see early data. It stopped tests and had test samples destroyed. It allowed its citizens to travel from Wuhan to other parts of the world, taking the disease with them, and then had the gall to complain when foreign nations (belatedly) restricted travel from China. The tyranny continues to restrict international scientific access to Wuhan, and it sells faulty coronavirus tests, masks, and protective equipment across the globe.
There must be swift and condign punishment for this utter betrayal of international trust.
The Trump administration should redouble its work with allies to lay bare the true extent of China's willful negligence in jeopardizing global health. Nearly 70,000 people in this country have been killed by this virus, with many times that number suffering horribly from the disease even though they have survived it. Tens of millions of people have lost their jobs. And the United States is not alone; the virus has exacted a terrible cost throughout the world.
This suffering is the shame of Chinese President Xi Jinping. We do not believe the virus is a manufactured bioweapon gone wrong or that China deliberately let it leak from its probable source, a research lab in Wuhan. But it did deliberately deceive the world and did deliberately let the virus infect the rest of the world, either as the primary aim or secondary result of disgraceful policy decisions. Its enduring malignancy and concealment of the truth proves that we are most certainly not all in this together, as Beijing's propaganda would like us to believe. We, by which we mean the rest of the world, are all in this against communist China's regime.

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