The world may be paying the price for bungling, fearful bureaucrats
Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, but in the case of local health officials in Wuhan, their reticence in coming forward with the truth in January may have been a decisive factor in allowing the coronavirus to inflict global havoc.
China’s Communist leadership has come under fire globally for its mishandling of the early days of the pandemic but a more nuanced consensus is now emerging that a cover-up by lower level officials was a fatal error that allowed the highly infectious virus to spiral out of control. In this more complex scenario, local bureaucrats, acting out of incompetence or a fear of punishment, may have initially kept their Beijing bosses in the dark about the virus. In May, when I interviewed Chuang Yin-ching, a senior official working for Taiwan’s Centres for Disease Control and one of the first foreign infectious diseases experts to access Wuhan, he provided a fascinating window into the early confusion on the ground.
Mr Chuang recounted an extraordinary, tense meeting of local, regional and Beijing officials with experts from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau on Jan 13, during which the most senior bureaucrat intervened to stop Wuhan colleagues from denying human-to-human transmission.
“Initially…the chairperson of the meeting, tried to deny human-tohuman transmission but finally the person from the central government health authority said, ‘Why do you give an old conclusion? Now the conclusion is that limited human-tohuman transmission cannot be excluded’,” said Mr Chuang.
The vital admission was based, in part, on a family cluster where a man was infected at the city’s Huanan seafood market and his wife, who had never been to market, also contracted the virus.
Mr Chuang described an absence of alarm among officials, who did not wear masks and offered him a leisurely city tour. The key nuggets of information that he managed to glean were enough for Taiwan to immediately trigger an emergency pandemic plan that has, so far, kept cases below 500, with just seven deaths.
Yesterday, The New York Times Mr Chuang’s interview with The Daily Telegraph as one of several pieces of evidence that are now backed up by an official reassessment in Washington of how the current global crisis began. It said that an internal US intelligence analysis corroborates news reports that officials in Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province tried to hide information from China’s central leadership about a virus that began spreading late last year.
The analysis does not exonerate Beijing’s leaders, concluding they still had a role in obscuring the truth of the outbreak by withholding information from the World Health Organisation.
However, while the new thesis does not contradict the Donald Trump administration’s fierce criticism of China, it does add more context to the inaction that created a deadly pandemic, taking the complications of human nature into account. A common self-protecting trait causes humans to conceal information in a way that can make the situation worse.
The universal fear of passing bad news up the chain was all the more acute in this case under an authoritarian system that encourages officials to withhold information for fear of reprisal. An enduring lack of transparency and accountability under President Xi Jinping’s communist regime also means we may never know enough about the cause of this virus to help prevent the next one.