As China continues to play blame game over the origin of novel coronavirus Covid-19, the findings of an internal report expose China’s manhandling of the pandemic in the early stage, which could have probably led to its worldwide outbreak. Titled as ‘internal document, please keep confidential’, the report shows that about 5,918 new cases of flu emerged on February 10 but China reported only 2,478 new cases.
Hospitals continued to flood with people reporting-flu like symptoms. The top-down bureaucracy approach of the Chinese government and rigid procedures scaled down the numbers but it could not stop Covid-19 from spreading to other parts of the world. The report shows despite such a grim situation, the local authorities displayed laxity in the handling of the initial outbreak and continued to remain reliant on flawed testing and reporting mechanisms.
While it takes 1-2 days to find out whether an individual is infected with Covid-19 or not, the report exposes that the Chinese authorities took 23.3 days on an average between the onset of symptoms to confirmed diagnosis, which could have hampered the ability to control the situation.
Even as China claims that it reported the outbreak of Covid-19 in China in a timely, open and transparent fashion, the health experts, especially after the data leak, believes that it knew much more than it told the world to paint an optimistic picture. On top of that, China has tried every trick in the past to pass on the blame to other countries and their inefficiency in dealing with the pandemic.
