I WOULD like to think that no one thing can be blamed for the predicament the world is now facing.
An unprecedented health crisis, a new global depression, the shutting down of modern life is something we’ve accepted with goodwill.
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What’s the point of feeling anger or casting aspersions while we’re in the middle of this? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself, anyway.
But that changed last night.
Locked indoors like millions of others in London, I read an investigation by the highly regarded Washington DC-based US news organisation Axios about the Chinese cover-up over coronavirus.
And I’ll admit it: I got mad.
The tick-tock feature detailing just how catastrophic China’s early cover-up really was has been published by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, who exclusively covers Beijing’s influence and intentions for Axios.
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This was the line that really got me. She wrote: “If Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did, the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95 per cent and its geographic spread limited.”
Just like the Chernobyl disaster that exposed to the world the very dangerous shortcomings of the USSR, we cannot forget how the Chinese government allowed the virus to spread while engaging in a despicable cover-up.
One of the first coronavirus patients started feeling unwell on December 10. The new illness was linked to the infamous wildlife market now forever connected to the outbreak six days later.
But health officials in Wuhan weren’t told about it until December 27.
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Then the cover-up really began.
On December 30 two Wuhan doctors posted information on the Chinese social media service WeChat about the virus but got in trouble for spreading information.
China only closed the market in question and informed the World Health Organisation on New Year’s Eve.
But on January 1 the Wuhan Public Security Bureau reprehended eight more local doctors for posting information on WeChat and an official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered testing to be stopped and samples to be destroyed.
So much time was lost.
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It also took a further week for information from Chinese researchers mapping the new coronavirus to be made public on January 9.
Unbelievably, the Wuhan Health Commission claimed there were no new cases of Coronavirus between January 11 and 17.
But by January 13 it was already too late, with the first case outside of China reported in Thailand.
And on January 15 someone left Wuhan to the USA carrying coronavirus.
On January 19, Wuhan still held its Lunar New Year banquet, seeing tens of thousands of people gather together.
It was two days later on January 21 that the administration’s People’s Daily newspaper mentioned the coronavirus for the first time – and at that point Beijing started to take it seriously.
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Citizens were warned that anyone who hides the virus “out of his or her own self-interest will be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity” and Wuhan was finally put into lockdown.
But not before around five million people left the city WITHOUT being screened and the New Year holiday in China continued until January 30 with hundreds of millions people travelling all over the country.
It was too late. As usual, the cover up was far worse than the crime.
Coronavirus was on the loose, not just in China but around the world.
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As Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian put it perfectly: “China is now trying to create a narrative that it’s an example of how to handle this crisis when in fact its early actions led to the virus spreading around the globe.”
That is unforgivable.
I agree with Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the US, who says China has just carried out “one of the worst cover-ups in human history”.
To read the full article on Axios, click here.
