“It was clear they did make mistakes – and not just mistakes that happen when you’re dealing with a novel virus, also bureaucratic and politically motivated errors”
Newly leaked documents reveal how China bungled COVID-19’s early days
Nov 30, 2020
NY Post – A trove of newly leaked documents details how China bungled its handling of the pandemic’s early days — including lowballing COVID-19 data and taking weeks to diagnose new cases, according to a report Monday.
The 117 pages of internal docs obtained by CNN outline how health officials in Hubei, where the virus was first detected, were hampered by chronic underfunding, leading to gaps in staffing and testing equipment.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the outlet:
“It was clear they did make mistakes — and not just mistakes that happen when you’re dealing with a novel virus — also bureaucratic and politically motivated errors in how they handled it.”
The papers, from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, reveal inconsistencies between what officials knew at the start of the outbreak and what they publicly reported, the report said.
Chinese officials “seemed actually to minimize the impact of the epidemic at any moment in time,” including by not including the number of suspected cases in its total at first, said William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.
A report from Hubei marked “Internal document, please keep confidential” shows how local health officials on Feb. 10 reported 5,918 new coronavirus cases — while the publicly reported number was just 2,478, according to CNN … Read more.
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