It isn't just the fact that it is authoritarian, it's the combination of authoritarianism, protectionism, and an evident practice of lying to its own population

It isn't just the fact that it is authoritarian, it's the combination of authoritarianism, protectionism, and an evident practice of lying to its own population in order to force narratives. Sure some of this applies to the U.S., but we don't have social credit scores or unmentionable events like Tiananmen. I imagine one strong motivation could be that the CCP is trying to delay or prevent quarantine on the global stage, which would cripple the Chinese export based economy. Could be justified with the assumption that although numbers are worse, China expects it will nonetheless successfully contain the outbreak before other nations need to shut down flights and such. Governments lie all the time. Communist style dictatorships like China and North Korea are particularly guilty, as their authoritarian rule depends on misinformation - not to mention in decades past, underreporting of negative data was not unheard of, for example in harvests of food when regions were in famine. We have nothing to go on but China's word for these figures and their entire government is predicated upon varying degrees of misinformation. Any data which could possibly paint China in a negative light should be scrutinized.