Confidential documents released by CNN revealed that the Chinese reported to the World Health Organization significantly lower morbidity data relative to the actual situation • All details
A series of documents leaked from the Chinese Hubei Province Disease Control Center show that China has been hiding information about corona disease from the world since the onset of the epidemic, the American news network CNN reported today (Tuesday).
One example of this, found in the 117 official and approved documents that were classified, is that on February 10, 5,918 new cases of the virus were registered in the province, a figure twice as high as China's that day to the World Health Organization.
There was also a difference in the number of deaths from the virus on February 17: the authorities reported 93 deaths, but in practice the number was higher - 196 deaths.
It is not clear whether the deception was intentional or caused by problems in the way information was transferred within the Chinese government.
That is, there were certainly blurring and concealment of information as well as the provision of misinformation and other problems, but this may have been done by local authorities for fear of a central government response.
In fact, the misinformation that China gave to the world was created due to the form of the regime, and not necessarily due to awareness of the central government.
The unveiled documents cover about six months, between October 2019 and April this year, and the inflexibility of the Chinese health system is noticeable throughout, making it very difficult for doctors and medical staff in the field to deal with the epidemic.
Time and time again, the procedures that went down in the field seemed disconnected from the understanding of what was happening - and these only created slowness and difficulty in quickly identifying people infected with the virus.
An example of the slowness and failures of the Chinese government is in March, so the gap between the onset of symptoms in people and the determination that it is contagious in the corona stood in Hubei province at 23.3 days.
In fact, this created a reality where by the time the corona infection was diagnosed as such, it could have already recovered from the disease - and also infected a large amount of people without sitting in isolation.
"Once you reach the result only after 23.3 days as it was in the county, you look at three-week results, and from that you make decisions that have an immediate effect," said Dash Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center.
Another problem, which is a kind of fate, is that the Chinese did not explain the fact that there was a very large outbreak of the flu epidemic in the area, at a level 20 times higher than usual, parallel to the beginning of the corona plague.
The outbreak has led to a huge upheaval in the Chinese health care system, which has been plagued in the first place by severe bureaucracy.
This outbreak was apparently one of the reasons why the Chinese health authorities were unable to understand and deal with the virus at an early stage, which might have prevented its spread around the world.
"The documents were organized to match what they wanted to deliver"
CNN noted that the documents they obtained were brought by a figure active within the Chinese medical authorities, who sought to flood out the authorities' failures.
The credibility of the documents has been confirmed by medical experts who have gone through them, one of whom is an expert who is in contact with the Chinese health authorities and who has also been exposed to documents originating within China.
On the other hand, the Chinese Ministry of Health and the district medical authorities did not respond to the information revealed and did not respond to the network's request on the subject.
According to Professor William Shepner, an epidemiologist at Vanderblit University in Tennessee, local authorities treated the data with a conservative approach - and if the information had been handled by American experts, the situation might have looked different.
"Officials have a tendency to reduce the amount of sick people or blue suspects and determine who is ill only in a situation where the person has been exposed with certainty to another carrier of the virus or has undergone significant tests for its detection," he said.
Andrew Marta, a Chinese expert at the esteemed Johns Hopkins University, said: "It's pretty clear that the person who wrote the documents organized them to suit what more senior officials wanted to say about the epidemic. We gave them all the information, but in a way To make senior officials embarrassed. "
A notable point of disorder in the information held by the Chinese themselves can be found in a report they provided to the World Health Organization on January 3, when 44 cases of unexplained pneumonia were reported.
However, an internal document suggests that in practice there were about 200 cases.
Here, too, it is not clear whether this is a deception or a bureaucracy that caused the diagnoses to be delayed, the results to arrive late and also probably a shortage of equipment.
Another interesting piece of information that emerges is the fact that a large proportion of the patients were not at all connected to the seafood market in the city of Wuhan, where it was alleged that the first eruption of the corona occurred, but rather in the city of Yichang, which is about 320 kilometers from Wuhan.
Beichang had far more Corona cases in December of last year than Bohan itself.
The documents further indicate that the Chinese government feared an angry public reaction to the decision to restrict its freedoms through closures, which were very difficult to carry out until President Xi Jingping himself forced the echelons on the ground to close the province.
Beyond that, the Chinese wanted to be portrayed as good to the world, so admitting failure would pose a threat to the regime for them.
The distance imposed on the province of Hubei led to the creation of a reality in which the echelons of the field did not fit their role, were desperate and did not convey the information correctly and caused a shortage in the media, which only intensified the chaos at the beginning.