High-ranking British governmental officials are reportedly furious with China’s handling of the coronavirus, believing that the nation’s communist government severely understated the severity of the viral epidemic and may be lying about its official count of diagnoses by an order of 40.

Reporting from the Daily Mail indicates that British officials believe China is set to face a “reckoning” over their handling of the virus, and faces the prospect of becoming a “pariah state” for its role in allowing coronavirus to spread.

British government figures are far from the only disease spectators who are extremely suspicious of China’s official disease diagnosis count and fatality rate. Italy surpassed China’s admitted death count last week, suggesting that China managed to contain the entirely novel disease to a greater extent, despite the virus being entirely in nature when first surfacing in the nation’s Hubei province. That is, if China’s claim of incurring 3,300 deaths can be trusted.

Boris Johnson, the UK’s Prime Minister, has been personally diagnosed with the coronavirus. He’s been forced to oversee British government response to the epidemic from quarantine. Johnson’s advisors have reportedly suggested that China’s coronavirus casualty and diagnosis statistics have been ‘downplayed by a factor of 15 to 40 times.‘

If such an estimate were to prove accurate, it would mean that China has actually incurred almost 50,000 deaths from the rapidly spreading viral disease. At most, more than 150,000 people could’ve died from coronavirus.

The outbreak of the virus has been traced with accuracy to a wet food market in Wuhan, China. China has refused to decisively ban the wild animal trade, despite a plethora of evidence that suggests such markets’ suspicious health and sanitation practices enabled the virus to cross from infecting animals such as bats and pangolins to humans.

Suspicion of China appears to be far from solely an American political phenomenon as the world struggles to contain the most severe global health pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu.