New information shows that China deliberately held off sharing their data regarding coronavirus with the World Health Organization, according to the Associated Press.
Internal documents reveal that China waited to release the genetic map, or genome of the virus for over week after their government labs had completely decoded the information. It was only after a different lab published the genome to a virologist website on January 11 that the Chinese government agreed to release their findings as well. From there, the Chinese government still withheld information involving infected patients from the WHO for an additional two weeks, data that could have dramatically softened the initial wave of the outbreak.
While the WHO would applaud China's cooperation in the public eye, privately they expressed their frustrations in meetings during the week of January 6, regarding China's refusal to share more data about how the virus was spread from person to person or what risk it posed on a global-wide scale.
"We’re going on very minimal information," said Maria Van Kerkhove during an internal meeting. Van Kerkhove is an American epidemiologist who now holds the position of the WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19. "It’s clearly not enough for you to do proper planning."
"We’re currently at the stage where yes, they’re giving it to us 15 minutes before it appears on CCTV," said Dr. Gauden Galea, the WHO’s top official in China, referring to China Central Television, the country's state-owned media network.
This comes at a time when US President Trump announced the country will cut ties with China on Friday. The US had been the WHO's largest donor, giving them $450 million dollars annually. That funding was recently suspended.
The released recordings of this meeting suggest that there wasn't any collusion between the WHO and China, which is the theory that Trump was suggesting. Rather, this would indicate that the WHO was also poorly informed by Xi's administration, and was left stuck in the middle of the two quarrelling nations.
The WHO claim to have had internal debates with how best to pressure China for the information on gene sequences and patient data without angering Beijing, while also fearing they could get Chinese scientists in trouble.
"This is exactly the same scenario, endlessly trying to get updates from China about what was going on," said Dr. Micheal Ryan. "WHO barely got out of that one with its neck intact given the issues that arose around transparency in southern China."
Dr. Ryan said China was not cooperating with them in the way that other countries had in the past, such as the Congo with the ebola outbreak.
"This would not happen in Congo and did not happen in Congo and other places," Ryan said. "We need to see the data…..It's absolutely important at this point."
Retrospective infection data shows that had the infection spread by a factor of 100 to 200 times more from the time the full genome was first decoded to when the WHO declared a global emergency on January 30. COVID-19 has now infected nearly than 6.5 million people and killed over 382,000 globally. Over 3 million recoveries have been recorded.
"It’s obvious that we could have saved more lives and avoided many, many deaths if China and the WHO had acted faster," said Ali Mokdad, University of Washington professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
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