Add a new chapter to Beijing’s long record of COVID chicanery: Turns out a Chinese researcher actually mapped the novel virus’ genome by Dec. 28, 2019 — two weeks before Beijing shared that vital info with the rest of the world.

We’ll never know how many lives greater openness would have saved, but the Communist regime’s compulsive secrecy plainly proved toxic.

Documents obtained by the House Energy and Commerce Committee show that a Chinese researcher, Dr. Lili Ren, uploaded her map of the virus’ genome to a US National Institutes of Health database on Dec. 28.

Because she failed to respond to any NIH questions, the sequence was never published and later deleted. Did her superiors intervene to keep her quiet?

Reporting in the years since indicates China’s equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got the info only on Jan. 5.

We’ll likely never know what internal-CCP political considerations drove that eight-day delay, nor why it took Bejing until Jan. 11 to finally share the genome with the World Health Organization.

The extra weeks would’ve helped researchers across the globe take earlier steps to fight the virus and, perhaps, track down its origins.

The news “underscores how cautious we have to be about the accuracy of the information” from China’s government, warns Jesse Bloom, a virologist who’s seen the documents.

It shows “we cannot trust any of the so-called ‘facts’ or data provided by the [Chinese Communist Party] and calls into serious question the legitimacy of any scientific theories based on such information,” lawmakers announced.

Among the “causes for concern” they note their probe uncovered: “the need for more oversight into research grants to foreign scientists.”

Indeed: Ren herself was a collaborator on NIH-funded coronavirus research overseen by EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit now barred from additional US funding for 10 years for its role in coronavirus work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where COVID likely originated.

Fact is, China has never come clean on what went on in the early days with the virus that went on to kill nearly 7 million.

Bloggers, researchers and their work have been arrested, mysteriously disappeared or died.

The government bans investigators from conducting complete probes, making it harder to track the bug’s origin — and fight it.

It’s obscene, and one more reason to treat the CCP as a fundamental threat to civilization itself.