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takyon writes:

Leaked documents show China mishandled early COVID-19 pandemic: report

Leaked documents from China show the country mishandled the early COVID-19 pandemic through misleading public data and three-week delays in test results, CNN reported Monday.

A whistleblower, who worked in the Chinese health care system, provided 117 pages of internal documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to CNN.

The files, which CNN had verified by six experts, showed how the region struggled to manage the coronavirus between October 2019 and April 2020 – a critical time period in which the virus spread from China to cause a worldwide pandemic.

[2020-12-01 23:22:03 UTC; Ed. update follows.]

The referenced CNN article is nearly 5,000 words long. In addition there are numerous graphs and graphics. I strongly encourage the community to read the entire article before drawing any conclusions or making comments. Here are some excerpts taken from near the end of the article:

It is not clear to what extent the central government was aware of the actions taking place in Hubei at that time, or how much information was being shared and with whom. The documents offer no indication that authorities in Beijing were directing the local decision-making process. However, Mertha, the JHU academic, said the mismatch between the higher internal and lower public figures on the February death toll "appeared to be a deception, for unsurprising reasons."

"China had an image to protect internationally, and lower-ranking officials had a clear incentive to under-report -- or to show their superiors that they were under-reporting -- to outside eyes," he said.

Conversely, however, the leaked documents also provide something of a defense of China's overall handling of the virus. The reports show that in the early stages of the pandemic, China faced the same problems of accounting, testing, and diagnosis that still haunt many Western democracies even now -- issues compounded by Hubei encountering an entirely new virus.

[...] China and its healthcare workers were under immense strain as the outbreak took hold, said Yang, from the Council of Foreign Relations.

"They had a massive run on the medical system. They were overwhelmed. There was truly despair among medical professionals by the end of January, because they were extremely overworked and they were also enormously discouraged by the high number of deaths that were occurring with a disease they had not treated previously," he added.

Hubei, which lags far behind Beijing, Shanghai and other major Chinese administrative divisions in terms of GDP per capita, was the first region to confront a virus that would go on to confound many of the world's most powerful countries.

Schaffner, from Vanderbilt University, said many of the comments in the documents might have been made in the US, "where, over the past 15 to 20 years, at particularly the state and the local level, public health funding has become constrained."

The documents show health care officials had no comprehension as to the magnitude of the impending disaster.

[...] Tuesday marks exactly 12 months since the first patient in Wuhan started showing symptoms, according to the Lancet study.

Lastly, there are likely to be strong feelings about the situation; I strongly encourage folk to try and keep things civil. Let one's anger be directed at the disease; not at fellow Soylentils. We are all struggling to various degrees to make sense of these highly disturbed circumstances. Please wear a mask, maintain physical distancing, and maintain proper hand washing practices. I can attest these practices help; I live in a state with one of the lowest rates of infection and death in the US. Even with that, I have a friend who was hospitalized for a couple weeks with COVID-19 and of a couple more acquaintances who have lost loved ones to this pandemic. There are the occasional exceptions, and I know people are growing tired and just want things to go back to normal. It is all the more important to do what we can to reduce the spread of this disease. --martyb

Original Submission