For the first time, since China started coming out with overwhelming numbers in January, recorded no fresh coronavirus infections on Saturday, on the following day after Communist Party leaders celebrated "major achievements" in the virus fight.

The virus emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, cases and fatalities peaked in mid-February but the neighbouring country has brought spread of the virus under control.

However, China’s death tally 4634 against a population of 1.4 billion people is far below the number of fatalities in much smaller countries.

The world doubts the reliability of the numbers China has purported. United States questions on how much information Beijing has shared with the international community.

The milestone comes a day after the opening of China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress, where Premier Li Keqiang said the country had "made major strategic achievements in our response to COVID-19."

However, he warned that the country still faced "immense" challenges.

Authorities in Wuhan have come under attack for reprimanding and silencing doctors who first raised the alarm about the virus late last year, and repeated changes to counting methodology have cast further doubt over China's official data.

Beijing has categorically denied accusations of a cover-up. China insists it's always shared information with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other countries from time to time.

Since first emerging in Wuhan the virus has spread across the planet, claiming quite 335,000 lives globally.

A new data leak from a military-run university indicates that China is hiding the important figures of COVID-19 cases. As per the database leaked from the National University of Defence Technology in Changsha city, China could have 640,000 cases rather than 84,000.

While China has officially reported just 84,029 cases there's widespread scepticism over this figure thanks to Beijing’s lack of transparency over the matter.

The dataset of coronavirus cases and deaths were leaked to policy and 100 Reporters.

Last month during his daily briefing, us President Donald Trump said, “China’s favourite by tons. It’s not even close. They’re way before us in terms of death.”

The US Intelligence Community during a classified report back to the White House concluded that Beijing had concealed the extent of the coronavirus pandemic outbreak in its country and had under-reported both total cases and deaths.

China had also revised its numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths by 50 per cent in Wuhan city – the epicentre of COVID-19 after which the entire number of confirmed COVID-19 cases were up by 325 to 50,333 and therefore the number of fatalities up by 1,290 to 3,869.

Later, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian issuing a press release denied any cover-up and said that the virus’s rapid spread led to undercounting.