The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Covid ‘could have been contained to just Wuhan’
If virus had been treated like plague by China, pandemic’s spread was not inevitable, says academic
AsiA corrEspondEnt
EARLY warnings that Covid-19 should be treated like “the plague” were ignored by Chinese officials, according to a damning new book.
The Covid-19 pandemic could have been contained within Wuhan local Chinese authorities had not made a series of mistakes, Prof Dali Yang, a leading authority on the Chinese political system writes in: Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiralled Out of Control.
A mass banquet held on Jan 18, just days before Wuhan was sealed off, brought together more than 100,000 people, despite local health officials being aware that the virus was spreading between humans, the book says.
Prof Yang draws the conclusion that the pandemic, with an estimated global death toll of 13.3 to 16.6 million, was not inevitable.
“I do think there was a meaningful chance that the pandemic could have been avoided,” said Prof Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.
He believes the Chinese health authorities were dealt a “remarkably strong hand of cards” at the start of the outbreak.
“China is a country with significant capabilities, which could have advanced the knowledge and response more rapidly at the end of December 2019,” said Prof Yang, who has connections across the political and health elite of China.
But this initial advantage was ultimately eroded by a fragmented, authoritarian political system ill-suited to handling the escalating emergency.
The crisis began when several of Wuhan’s doctors recognised in the closing days of 2019 that a “pneumonia of unknown etiology” (PUE) showed clear signs of “human-to-human” transmission. Experts among them feared it was linked to the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus that traumatised East Asia in 2002-2004, with one doctor telling the local Centre for Disease Control (CDC): “It’s a disease we’ve never encountered before, it’s also a family [cluster of ] infections. Something is definitely wrong!”
The suspected coronavirus was swiftly confirmed by Vision Medicals, a Guangzhou-based lab, which performed genome sequencing lung fluid from “Patient A”, a 65-year-old man with severe pneumonia and “multiple scattered patchy faint opacities in both lungs” and who was not responding to drugs.
But the book notes that “due to the sensitivity of the diagnostic results”, the lab only provided confirmation of the positive test result for a SARS-like coronavirus to the hospital by phone.
Screenshots that appeared on social media between an anonymous scientist at the lab and her boss showed that they immediately recognised the coronavirus “should be treated in the same class as the plague” for prevention and control purposes. Despite the early evidence pointing to potential catastrophe, the local
‘China’s significant capabilities could have advanced the knowledge and response more rapidly’
CDC was slow to react. The growing number of cases were not fed, as they should have been, into the National Notifiable Infectious Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS), created after the 20022004 SARS epidemic killed close to 800 people globally.
The system – the largest in the world and a source of national pride – had broken down. Gao Fu of the national CDC only learned of the Wuhan outbreak on social media on Dec 30.
Although he swiftly set in motion a series of emergency responses by the National Health Commission and China CDC, the next crucial few weeks were characterised by missteps, censorship, political interests and counterproductive moves that failed to prevent the uncontrolled spread of the virus.
“The first week in January became a pivotal turning point for handling the outbreak. Just the wrong kind,” concludes the book.
“The failure to act before January 20 was monumental,” it adds.