Coronavirus, CNN: “China’s Slow Response and Cover-ups”

According to what emerges from the 117 pages of documents from Hubei Province Center for Disease Control, where Covid began to spread in late 2019, “the Chinese authorities provided the world with more optimistic data than they had.”

Among the cases cited are the data disclosed in Feb. 10, on the day that President Xi Jinping first reached out to health personnel at Wuhan hospitals to encourage him in the battle against the virus. That day, CNN says, compared to officially released data that spoke of 2,478 new infections, and the total increased to 40,000 since the beginning of the epidemic. actual cases would have been more than double, that is, 5,918.

Furthermore, even if the authorities in Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, presented their response in the early days of the epidemic as efficient and transparent, in reality the health system relied on poor tools for testing and the broadcast. information. A confidential report At the beginning of March, he stated, among other things, that from the appearance of the first symptoms in the patients to the confirmation of the diagnosis of Covid-19, an average of 23.3 days elapsed, which significantly compromised the efforts to monitor and combat the disease. disease.

The investigation, which CNN defines as the most important news leak in China since the onset of the disease, is published a year after December 1, 2019, in which the first known patient showed the symptoms of Covid-19. Wuhan, according to a study in the journal Lancet. At the same time, it broke out not only in Wuhan, but also in other cities such as Yichan me Xianning, a flu epidemic with 20 times more people infected than the previous year. Although it is not possible to establish whether there was a possible relationship between the two diseases, the Chinese authorities have not provided information on the extent of the flu epidemic to date, which, however, created an additional burden for health facilities that they had to face. in the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic.