DIDN’T COVER UP OUTBREAK: CHINA
DIDN’T KNOW UNTIL JAN 19 HOW INFECTIOUS THE VIRUS IS, SAYS BEIJING
WASHINGTON/BEIJING :China said it did not know until January 19 how infectious the coronavirus is, pushing back against accusations that it intentionally withheld information about the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan from the world.
While Chinese officials knew that there were signs of human-to-human transmission earlier, it was hard to ascertain the new virus’s level of contagiousness, said Zeng Yixin, vice minister of the National Health Commission (NHC), at a press briefing in Beijing on Friday. There are diseases like HIV that while infectious, are not easily transmitted from person to person, he said.
It was only on January 19 that Chinese scientists concluded that the virus spreads easily among people and China released that information to the world the next day, said Zeng.
The accounting of events from top officials came as China faces growing blame for a delay in sounding the alarm about the coronavirus. Zeng was responding to an AP report in April that cited confidential documents showing Chinese officials were internally discussing the possibility of widespread infections six days before President Xi Jinping warned the public of the dangers of the virus.
The alleged delay resulted in millions of people travelling from Wuhan to elsewhere in the country and the world.
Zeng said China concluded on
January 9 that it was dealing with a novel coronavirus and began developing test kits the next day. On January 12, it informed the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak.
On January 14, a national meeting of provincial health officials was held. “Many uncertainties remained. We understood there’s more research needed on human-to-human transmission and we couldn’t rule out the chance of a further spread of the virus,” said Zeng.
Besides its alleged delay in disclosing information on the outbreak at an earlier stage, China has faced scepticism about its official numbers. As per official data, 82,933 people in China have been infected with Covid-19 and 4,633 have died from it.