Whilst I'm about I thought I'd post this link from Associated Press about what really happened with China from the outbreak of the virus (which apparently can now be traced back to the 1st December, 2019 in China) to WHO declaring an international health emergency on the 30th January.
It is a very long read and many of the sources it quotes refuse to be identified for fear of reprisals but I think it gives a true picture of what went on - and how China's state involvement and 'embargoing' of all the information subsequently led to a factor of the worldwide pandemic being a factor up to 200 times worse than it needed to have been.
A brief synopsis for those not wishing to plough through it all is that the Chinese doctors were extremely quick off the mark to identify a previously unknown coronavirus and 'decoded' its makeup within in days (rather than months for previously unknown coronaviruses).
Unfortunately when the Chinese state was notified of this, they suppressed all this information, seemingly because they wanted to show the world that China was a world medical power and the first on its own in the world to deal 'successfully' with a new coronavirus.
It seems it wanted the 'prestige' of giving the world the 'answers' to the virus, rather than what they should have been doing, namely sharing with the world what information they had and allowing collaboration worldwide to work on dealing with what and how the virus was and how dangerous/not dangerous it really was.
Crucially although the initial Chinese doctors did fantastically well to sequence the virus (thus allowing for tests to be done to see if people had caught it) they did not have to hand the specialist medical experts who could have advised them about how fast the virus 'reproduces' - the critical 'R' rate we've heard so much about.
With the Chinese state 'sitting' on the information, WHO was left hanging in the wind because it thought that demanding information from China would make them close the door to them, so instead they went along the road of 'praising' them hoping they would open up more to them about what they knew about the virus.
It's pretty clear that the Chinese doctors did extremely well initially but the state wanted to control everything and kept the WHO and the rest of the world in the dark.
It seems it only became more open when it was shocked to learn that Thailand had identified a coronavirus patient arriving from China and had partially sequenced the virus themselves.
The bottom line I guess was that WHO depends totally from all country's being open and honest to them, so pandemics like this can be faced as soon as they can by all the best medical brains in the world but China seemed to want be seen as some sort of world medical leader rather than need the help of others to take on the virus - with the issue of the R rate not having the required expert guidance to fully grasp how reproductive this thing actually was.
The deliberate delay by the Chinese state led to the virus needlessly spreading worldwide for a number of weeks, with the belief at the time that it really wasn't much to be bothered about as such.
Maybe China thought they had let the cat out of the bag in the first place and wanted to put it back in it again before anyone had noticed but whatever their thinking was the plain truth is that they failed to cooperate with the rest of the world when there was more time to put a lid on it - with all the subsequent and needless deaths occurring and the ruining of much of the worlds economy.
https://apnews.com/3c061794970661042b18d5aeaaed9fae
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