Health authorities could have isolated infected people and traced and quarantined their contacts. Governments could have made sure tests were immediately developed to find as many cases as possible. The rest of the world would have had to act, too. What could have happened: China tells the world the truth and the pandemic is avoided.Ĭhina could have notified the World Health Organization sometime in early to mid-December that it had an outbreak of a previously unknown coronavirus similar to the dreaded SARS pathogen, and immediately sequenced the virus and shared the genome, allowing tests to be developed. Li Wenliang, who had noted that the mystery pneumonia cases resembled SARS and warned colleagues to wear protective gear, and who would later die of Covid.Īt that point, the virus had had weeks to spread far beyond China’s borders and was beginning to establish outbreaks globally.
31, 2019, as rumors were growing, the Wuhan health officials acknowledged 27 cases of an “unexplained pneumonia” caused by a virus, but claimed there was no evidence of “obvious human to human transmission.” The next day, a Chinese state media outlet announced that authorities had disciplined eight people for spreading rumors about the virus, including Dr. Toward the end of December, hospitals in Wuhan were known to be quarantining sick patients, and medical staff members were falling sick - clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, the first step toward a pandemic.įinally, on Dec. Whistleblower doctors reported being silenced from mid-December on. Several Western scientists said colleagues in China had told them of the outbreak by mid-December. The South China Morning Post, a newspaper owned by a major Chinese company, reported that Chinese officials found cases that date to Nov. But evidence strongly suggests that China knew the danger long before it told the world the truth. Reporters working for Western media have been kicked out, and even local citizen journalists who shared information during the early days were jailed. Our information about what happened when the coronavirus apparently was first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, remains limited. What happened in the first weeks: China covered up the outbreak. By looking at them, and understanding what went wrong, we can hope to avoid similar mistakes in the future. To examine these questions is to uncover a brutal truth: Much suffering was avoidable, again and again, if different choices that were available and plausible had been made at crucial turning points.
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