There was compelling evidence by late
December that the new coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was spreading from person to
person, but Chinese officials didn't take the threat of a significant outbreak
seriously until the coronavirus was detected in Thailand on Jan. 13, The Associated Press reports, citing
internal documents and interviews with Chinese officials. Top officials in
Beijing started preparing for a pandemic on Jan. 14, but secretly, keeping the
public in the dark as the virus spread for six days. President Xi Jinping
issued a televised warning on Jan. 20, at which point more than 3,000 people
had been infected.
Chinese officials spent the six days
distributing test kits to trace the virus nationwide, ordering wider screening
of patients, preparing hospitals for an infectious virus, and easing the
stringent rules for confirming coronavirus infections, AP reports.
During that week, Wuhan "hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of
people" and "millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year
celebrations."
"If they took action six days earlier,
there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have
been sufficient," Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, told AP.
"We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system," and
lives would have been saved. Researchers later estimated that if the public had
been warned a week earlier and told to wear masks, forego travel, and
social-distance, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds.
China denies that it hid the outbreak early
on, and some outside experts argue that Beijing's actions were defensible given
its private actions and the risk of provoking unnecessary hysteria. "But
the early story of the pandemic in China shows missed opportunities at every
step," AP reports. "Under Xi, China's
most authoritarian leader in decades, increasing political repression has made
officials more hesitant to report cases without a clear green light from the
top.
No comments:
Post a Comment