I guess all the China basher are angry and frustrated now that their "Chernobyl moment" DOES NOT come to fruition and after this incident the CCP will smell like roses compare to you know who. And they blame left and right from WHO to Science magazine for praising China effort to curb the epidemic instead of criticizing CCP . And as always they quote China basher like Munk school of Global affair in Toronto
Don’t Let the Chinese Government Escape Blame for Coronavirus’s Initial Spread
Therese Shaheen
March 10, 2020, 5:30 AM CDT
From almost the very beginning of the COVID-19/coronavirus crisis in January and early February, it’s
whether it might be the “Chinese Chernobyl.” Could the crisis expose the weakness of the mix of oppression, information control, and social disgust that underpin the Chinese Communist regime and trigger its collapse?
Others have that it might instead be “president Xi Jinping’s Tiananmen,” meaning he will use all the tools at his disposal to tighten down and prevent, well . . . a Chinese Chernobyl.
It is too soon to know what may happen. But it’s not too soon for attempts to whitewash the timeline and Chinese-government actions in the earliest moments of the crisis. Indeed, even now, the level of public anxiety about both the virus and what the Chinese government is doing and saying about it remain high.
It is helpful to review the current status and the timeline that got us here. On Monday, February 24, the World Health Organization determined that reported cases of COVID-19/coronavirus had peaked. At the time, there were about 76,000 reported cases in China, and about 1,800 cases elsewhere in the world. In the United States, there were 14 reported cases. As of March 7, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and state and local public health reporting suggest the number is more than 300 cases, a twenty-fold increase. Globally, there are more than 100,000 cases, with more than 350 deaths in Italy alone.
The world has barely begun to reckon with what the Chinese government claims to have gotten under control. It’s true that forced quarantining and other extreme measures in China played a critical role.
The World Health Organization report of its February mission to China praises the PRC for its response: “The response structures in China were rapidly put in place according to existing emergency plans and aligned from the top to the bottom. This was replicated at the four levels of government (national, provincial, prefecture and county/district).” The leader of the World Health Organization mission to China in February, Canadian epidemiologist Dr. Bruce Aylward, encouraged the world to “access the expertise of China,” adding that “if I had COVID-19, I’d want to be treated in China.”
But the WHO report and subsequent reporting about what the world can learn from China represents a real-time cleansing of the actual record, a record that includes intentional obfuscation and failure to respond in the early stages of the crisis. This includes the government’s early attempts to stifle communication about the virus, the censorship of doctors and others on social media as cases were being observed in late December, and the continuing suppression of information on social media across the country about how the government, from President Xi Jinping to local administrators, continues to mislead the public and the rest of the world.
On March 3, researchers at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy published “Censured Contagion,” a report that meticulously documents a timeline and body of facts that paint quite a different picture than the WHO report, and placing WHO’s accolades for China’s “response structures” that were “rapidly put in place” in doubt. The WHO report concludes that the beginning of the epidemic was December 30, 2019, with the collection of samples from a pneumonia patient in Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital. Data provided in graphics in the
