This was clear from the start. In typical authoritarian communist fashion, China clamped down on the spread of information both internally and externally. Here's probably the best known example[0], but the most egregious manipulation came in the form of outbreak numbers, which are allegedly at least 10x underreported[1]. This was a deliberate combination of lack of testing, lockdown preventing citizens from seeking treatment at hospitals, misreporting cause of death by listing E.G. pneumonia, and other issues. When an authoritarian dictatorship orders no new cases, the people report no new cases.

I don't understand how people are so shocked to hear of China's manipulation. There's evidence for this kind of trickery from every major socialist state, especially the Soviet Union, which formed the mold the the initial CCP.

An authoritarian state can only exist so long as the people are too respectful and/or afraid to revolt. This creates perverse incentives to save face by, say, controlling information or spreading disinformation even at the cost of citizens' lives. And speaking of perverse incentives, like any massive bureaucracy, they are pervasive in states like China. For example, factor output is measured by the government by tracking electricity production. So if the government orders factories to come back online, but you don't have goods or employees to produce anything, you run the machines empty to run up the numbers.

0. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/china-li-wenliang-whistl...

1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...