The only places I would trust the numbers are South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Israel.
Give the reports of outright abuse of power (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquir...) or corruption, depending on your perspective, I'm not sure why you would say it wasn't malicious. It's been about saving face, if recovery was possible. If not, shrug What are you going to do about it anyway? Trusting anything from official Chinese reports, is foolish. You always need some sort of 3rd party corroboration to get to the truth and the WHO has shown bias (subject to Chinese influence, for their own pragmatic reasons of access).
That being said, their model, wherein they locked down populations was effective and appropriate. Combined with testing and some sort of ID-based tagging, the US could probably manage better than the current course, which will just blow up later anyway.
China reported 36 new cases yesterday, all but one are people returning from overseas caught under quarantine, and whenever there is sporadic local transmission, they tighten control in that area obviously while the country at large has returned to work.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3078010/chin...