The Chinese regime has likely understated the COVID-19 death toll by as much as 17,000 percent in a systematic data suppression campaign to sustain its political image, an analysis by a U.S. economist has found. That would put the number of COVID-19 deaths in China at around 1.7 million rather than 4,636, the two-year cumulative death figure that the Chinese authorities have maintained on the books. A vast majority of those officially recorded deaths—about 97 percent—came from Wuhan during the first three months of the pandemic, with only hundreds more reported in the rest of the country. The Chinese regime only reported two additional deaths since April 1, 2020, ranking China as having the world’s lowest COVID-19 death rate, which Zhong Nanshan, the Chinese epidemiologist overseeing China’s outbreak response, boasted about just last week. But that jaw-dropping data point—hundreds of times lower than that of America, gave George Calhoun pause. …