China waited 6 days to warn of virus: report

WASHINGTON

Chinese authorities waited nearly one week to alert the public after they determined the country was facing a likely pandemic, according to a report published Wednesday.

In the interim, mass gatherings continued in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, including a banquet for tens of thousands, and millions traveled for Chinese New Year celebrations.

It was not until Jan. 20 that Chinese President Xi Jinping raised the alarm, six days after the assessment was made Jan. 14, The Associated Press reported, citing internal documents and expert estimates. More than 3,000 people became infected during the time it took for Xi to alert the public, it said.

"The delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak," the AP wrote.

More than 2 million people have been infected by the novel coronavirus and more than 128,000 have died from COVID-19 complications in the four months that have passed since it was detected in December, according to data being compiled by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

“This is tremendous,” Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told AP. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.”

The AP's investigation could not determine if it was local officials who failed to report coronavirus cases, or if it was national leaders who did not record them. Nor could it say definitively what information officials in Wuhan had at the time.

But experts said it is certain that China's rigid authoritarian structure, particularly as it pertains to information flows and reluctance among lower-level officials to relay bad news to higher-ups, "muffled early warnings."

It pointed in particular to punishments handed down to eight doctors who sought to raise the alarm on accusations of "rumor mongering," which it said had a "chilling" effect on local hospitals in Wuhan.

“Doctors in Wuhan were afraid,” Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago, told the news agency. “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession.”

Concerns of a possible pandemic were first seriously raised when the first case was reported outside China on Jan. 13. After the case was identified in Thailand, officials began to orchestrate a nationwide effort to determine how widespread the problem was, but without telling the public the process had begun.

Documents the AP obtained show Ma Xiaowei issued a dour determination of the situation Jan. 14 during a confidential teleconference with local health officials.

During that call, Ma was to convey instructions from Xi, the Chinese president, as well as Premier Li Jeqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan. The memo reviewed by the AP does not specify what the instructions entailed.

“The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event,” the memo records Ma saying.

The memo and a separate faxed statement from China's National Health Commission saying the teleconference was held in response to the case in Thailand, were given to the AP by an anonymous source within the medical field who did not want to be named out of concern for retribution.

Part of the reason for the six-day delay in warning the public may have been March's convening of China's legislature, and the country's top consultative body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the two most important political gatherings in the country.

“The imperatives for social stability, for not rocking the boat before these important Party congresses is pretty strong,” Daniel Mattingly, a scholar of Chinese politics at Yale, said, according to the AP. “My guess is, they wanted to let it play out a little more and see what happened.”

After Ma's teleconference, the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) issued the highest possible emergency response internally Jan. 15 and the National Health Commission issued instructions to local officials to take a series of aggressive health measures to test, open up new facilities and have health workers wear protective gear.

This was being done at the same time officials were downplaying the severity of the virus in public, the AP reported.

“We have reached the latest understanding that the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low,” Li Qun, the head of China's CDC, told state television Jan. 15, the same day he raised the internal alert level.