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China's 6-day delay in warning set the stage for the COVID-19 pandemic

In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicentre of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations. AP News reports that President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, 20 January. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence.

The report says that delay from14 January to 20 to January was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time – the beginning of the outbreak. China’s attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2m people and taken more than 126,000 lives.

“This is tremendous,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California – Los Angeles. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.” Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But AP News reports, the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Centre for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins confirm. Yet during that time, from 5 January to 17 January, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

The report says it’s uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It’s also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine. But what is clear, experts say, is that China’s rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings.

The report says the punishment of eight doctors for ‘rumour-mongering’, broadcast on national television on 2 January, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals.

[link url="https://apnews.com/68a9e1b91de4ffc166acd6012d82c2f9"]Full AP News report[/link]

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