One of China’s top scientists defended the country’s delays in global alarm in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, saying officials were initially unsure whether the pathogen was infectious among humans because of close contacts of early patients. they did not seem to fall ill.
In the early days of 2020, after the mysterious cluster of pneumonia erupted in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Chinese experts quarantined 700 close contacts with the first patients, including 400 medical workers caring for them, but none showed signs of disease.
This led experts to suspend the conclusion that the coronavirus was transmissible among humans, said Liang Wannian, a senior National Health Commission official who monitored China’s virus response until September.
“In early January, none of the two dozen cases – and later increased to four dozen – fit those criteria,” Liang said in an exclusive interview Tuesday on Bloomberg News in Beijing. “Our call at the time was that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
It was not until January 20 that China confirmed that the virus can be transmitted among humans, after some of the medical professionals became infected. By then, the situation had gotten out of hand: days later, Wuhan and the wider Hubei Province were forced to close draconally as infections increased and hospitals were overwhelmed.
China has faced strong criticism for the lost days. The initial minimization of the severity of the pathogen threat allowed Covid-19 to quickly jump across borders to become a pandemic that has infected more than 86 million people and killed more than 1.8 millions.
It is now understood that many Covid-19 patients are asymptomatic, which may explain why close contacts in quarantine in these early patients did not appear to fall ill.
Liang’s comments are the most detailed public statements by top Chinese officials of the time describing the circumstances of the crisis’s onset.
Medical staff arrive with a suspected Covid-19 patient at Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in January 2020.
Photographer: Hector Retamal / AFP / Getty Images
Changing narrative
However, some governments acted much faster than China. Taiwan dodged a major outbreak by imposing border controls and other strict stripes in January.
Taiwanese health officials visited Wuhan at first and realized that some of the first patients had nothing to do with the wet market that was suspected to be the place where people became infected. This led them to conclude that human transmission was taking place.
Faced with global bitterness, China has tried to displace the narrative about the origins of the virus, with state media and government officials pushing for the possibility that the pathogen would not emerge solely in the Asian country.
China, making it harder to solve the mystery of where Covid It began
Liang, a public health veteran who also oversaw Beijing’s response to the SARS outbreak in 2003, echoed the theory.
He said that while many speculations focused on wild animals on the market that served as an intermediate host for the virus that was then transmitted to humans, most of the first patients were traders who sold seafood there.
“Our hypothesis was that they mostly sold animals or meat, but that wasn’t the case,” Liang said. “We have to study where the virus comes from in the Huanan fish and seafood market: does it come from animals or other goods transported through the cold chain or transported by people? The market is probably not at the beginning of the chain.
Political divisions
The lack of definitive solutions to the mystery has fueled the political divisions created by the pandemic, especially between China and the United States. The Trump administration has claimed that the virus has leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where many coronaviruses have been studied. – a scenario that Liang said has “zero per cent“Probability to be true.
The P4 laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Photographer: Hector Retamal / AFP / Getty Images
China’s actions have not helped dispel mistrust. Representatives and scientists from the World Health Organization visited Wuhan in January and February, but were banned from entering the Wuhan market to conduct research.
Difficulties have continued and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday that China has delayed the trip of experts sent to the Asian country to investigate the origins of the virus. Chinese officials have not yet finalized the permit to allow the WHO team to enter the country, despite months of negotiation and planning.
The WHO issues a rare reprimand to China for delaying the journey of the origins of the viruses
Liang said during the interview that the WHO investigation “would start very soon” in China. Among the work to be done will be the analysis of data and samples taken from the Wuhan market in early 2020, before it is completely disinfected.
Liang, who left his job at China’s National Health Commission in September and joined the newly founded Vanke School of Public Health at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, rejected claims that the country has not been enough. published.
However, he acknowledged that the lack of international exposure among many of China’s clinical and public health physicians can hinder effective communication.
“We need to intensify efforts to cultivate talents and capabilities to familiarize them with international standards and enable them to communicate” and be better understood, Liang said.
– With the assistance of Tom Mackenzie, Dong Lyu and Claire Che