A report by CNN this week, based on documents leaked from Hubei province shows how Beijing was not releasing the correct picture to the world about the extent of the spread of the coronavirus in China. Apart from the fact that it was completely unable to tackle the spread, with faulty testing and slow diagnosis, with as many as 23 days for test reports to come. The CNN report, which is based on a 117-page document leaked from the Hubei Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, states that on 10 February, when China had made public 2,478 cases, in reality, there were 5,918 new cases. Deaths were also being underreported. Apparently, the attempt throughout was to downplay the severity of the spread of the virus, including the fact that the infection had reared its head in 2019 itself. Also, contrary to what is believed of the high efficiency of the Chinese system, the report says that China’s response to the outbreak was slow, apart from being hobbled by under-funding, demotivated staff, bureaucratic hurdles and an “unresponsive” China Infectious Disease Direct Reporting System. Overall, the picture that the report paints is one of inefficiency and also of possible attempts at obfuscation. This has to be seen in the context of how China was imposing restrictions on domestic travel by January 2020, while simultaneously pushing for international travel by Chinese citizens—including reprimanding countries that were blocking flights from China—which resulted in the infection spreading far and wide. Clearly for Beijing, the health of the Chinese economy took precedence over global health.
The obvious question is what the World Health Organization is doing about this. If a media company can unearth information of what has been always suspected to be the case, that China was fudging its numbers and was allowing the virus to spread across the world—either unintentionally or deliberately—why is it that WHO is unable to get a probe started even a year after the first case of coronavirus was detected—officially—in China? Till date the source of the virus is not known, which is necessary not only to get to the bottom of the crisis, but also to ensure that such outbreaks do not occur in the future. But until now the WHO has not made any progress into probing the source, believed to be the wet market in Wuhan. The team of WHO experts who visited China in January, did not go anywhere near the wet market and another team that went to China recently, sat in Beijing for three weeks. On Monday, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that a probe was going to happen and that “we need to know the origin of this virus because it can help us prevent future outbreaks”. Well said! However, there have been media reports that suggest that the actual probe at the Wuhan wet market may be led by Chinese scientists, and WHO will merely accept those findings. This is preposterous. The investigation must be carried out by international experts of repute, people whose words the world can trust. Given China’s track record in this case, and given the way China has been trying to deflect blame—the latest is that the virus originated in India!—the world will find it difficult to trust China. The world is finding it difficult to trust even WHO, a specialised agency of the United Nations, because of the influence China wields on it.
The question also is what India is doing as the chair of the Executive Body of WHO. It was elected to this post in May, but it’s not clear what it has done in the last seven months to justify the position it holds. It is hoped that India is not being diffident about leading the charge against China. It’s an open and shut case—China is guilty of unleashing a pandemic on the world, guilty of murder and mayhem, guilty of breaking the financial backbone of the rest of the world, possibly to further its own rise. And it must pay for what it has done. As the country with the second highest number of corona cases in the world, over one lakh deaths, and a broken economy, India cannot sit in WHO as a mute spectator. It must use its position to hold China accountable, not just for itself but for the world. With supposedly successful anti-corona vaccines making their way to the market, we are likely to forget about the virus once things normalise. But just because normalcy will return, does not mean that it can be business as usual with China. It must be held accountable, as else it will get away with murder..