China exonerates self from white paper on COVID-19
BEIJING: A beleaguered China on Sunday exonerated itself from the global allegations of delay in reporting the Coronavirus outbreak, saying the virus was first noticed in Wuhan on December 27 as a viral pneumonia and humanto-human transmission was discovered on January 19, after which it took swift actions to curb it.
A whitepaper released by the Chinese government gave a lengthy explanation to refute the allegations of cover up and delay by Beijing on reporting the COVID-19 outbreak last year in Wuhan.
US President Donald Trump and leaders of several countries have accused China of not being transparent in reporting the deadly disease, leading to huge human casualties and economic crisis across the world.
According to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the Coronavirus has infected over 68,00,000 people and killed nearly 4,00,000 across the world. The US is the worst affected country with over 1.9 million cases and more than 1,09,000 deaths, while the total number of cases in China stand at 84,177.
The contagion has also battered the world economy with the IMF saying that the global economy, which was in a sluggish recovery even before the Coronavirus outbreak, is now bound to suffer a "severe recession" in 2020. The World Bank has also called for countries to step up efforts to fight the disease and improve the economy.
According to the whitepaper, after the COVID-19 was identified by a hospital in Wuhan on December 27, the
local government called experts to look into the cases through an analysis of the patients' condition and clinical outcome, the findings of epidemiological investigations, and preliminary
laboratory testing results.
"The conclusion was that they were cases of viral pneumonia," it said. Researchers from a high-level expert team organised by the National Health Commission (NHC) confirmed that the virus was transmissible among humans for the first time on January 19, hours before they notified the public, and less than a month before the experts were alerted by the newly-discovered disease, it said.
Before January 19, there was not sufficient evidence to indicate that it could be transmitted by humans, said Wang Guangfa, a leading Chinese respiratory expert who was among the first group of experts dispatched by the NHC to Wuhan in early January.
When the experts landed in Wuhan, they found the number of fever patients soared during that time, and also found patients with no direct exposure to the Huanan wet market where the virus believed to have first emerged, he was quoted as saying by state-run Global Times. Bats and pangolins were suspected to have been intermediary transmission sources but the evidence was not sufficient, Wang said, adding that it was left for science to decide whether the virus was capable of humanto-human transmission as any abrupt decision could have caused unimaginable consequences.