- A group of world leaders charged with leading an autopsy in the global response to the coronavirus pandemic has issued a rebuke to China’s early treatment of the outbreak.
- The Independent Pandemic Preparedness and Response Panel, which reports to the World Health Organization, punished the Chinese government on Monday for what it suggested was a clumsy response to COVID-19.
- “What is clear to the Panel is that public health measures could have been applied more vigorously by local and national health authorities in China in January,” they wrote in a new report.
- The group also promised to issue new guidelines to fix the world’s “global pandemic alert system”, which it called “not fit for purpose”, in another report that will arrive in May.
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A group of world leaders charged with leading an autopsy in the global response to the coronavirus pandemic has issued a rebuke to China’s early treatment of the outbreak. The group is promising to continue with a long list of new recommendations on where the world went wrong in responding to the crisis.
The Independent Pandemic Preparedness and Response Panel, a group of world leaders who collectively report to the World Health Organization, punished the Chinese government on Monday for what it suggested was a clumsy response to the emergence of COVID-19, which ended up leaving control last year.
“What is clear to the Panel is that public health measures could have been applied more vigorously by local and national health authorities in China in January,” said the Independent Panel in a new report. The panel includes Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia.
China was the first country to fight the coronavirus pandemic, closing several regions in early 2020 to control its spread. Even so, the virus managed to escape China’s borders.
Still, the panel noted that China is not the only country to have fought in its response to the pandemic.
“Never before in modern times has the international community been called upon to respond to a global health crisis of this magnitude and with such widespread consequences,” the report continued. “The response of the international system was considered insufficient in many ways.”
The group went on to call groups of countries such as the G7 and G8 “largely reactive” in their response to COVID, rather than proactive in implementing successful mitigation or control protocols.
With nearly 100 million confirmed cases and more than two million deaths recorded worldwide, following the panel’s guidelines can be crucial to preventing these lethal public health crises in the future.
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‘The global pandemic alert system is not adequate’
To prevent another threatening virus from overlapping the world’s public health systems, the panel promised to review existing preventive structures, as well as to strengthen protocols to deal with emerging diseases.
“The global pandemic alert system is not suitable for its purpose,” wrote the report’s authors. “The critical elements of the system are slow, uncomfortable and undecided.”
The panel reviewed the recommendations for dealing with the pandemic that the World Health Organization published throughout 2020 and identified nearly 900 individual guidelines issued by WHO or its regional offices. The flood of ever-evolving guidelines may have overwhelmed people and contributed to the confusion, the report noted.
“The sheer volume of recommendations issued suggests to the Panel the greatest risk of lack of direction, clarity and consistency of the kind that would have helped countries to prioritize their responses,” wrote the authors, adding that they will continue to examine “coherence and prioritization of recommendations and evidence regarding your actual usage patterns “.
The panel now plans to take a closer look at “the methods and tools employed by surveillance and alarm systems” around the world and assess the effectiveness of these systems. They pledged to issue a report in May this year that could help carry out a “global reset” and lay the groundwork for a more effective response than the one that developed in 2020.
Read More: The UK hospital system is on the verge of collapse, forcing overworked staff to postpone cancer treatments, stretch oxygen supplies and risk COVID-19
Another report claims that Chinese authorities in Wuhan have failed to target a rapid and cohesive response to the virus
The panel’s findings were released on the same day that the Al Jazeera news agency published unpublished videos about the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak. The footage, filmed clandestinely by two reporters and smuggled out of China, shows how fear and confusion first spread in Wuhan, the Chinese capital of Hubei province.
The videos, which Al Jazeera claims to have been filmed between January 19 and 22, 2020, demonstrate the initial lack of urgency with which leaders in Wuhan found the new coronavirus. Later images capture the return to a much more serious state that engulfed the city, which ended up being blocked. One of the reporters who reportedly filmed the footage wrote in his diary that “the lack of staff and equipment in Wuhan has caused many infected patients to have denied treatment.”
Despite China’s initial difficulties in fighting the virus, strict public health measures have helped the country to keep the newly diagnosed daily cases low. Last week, however, the Associated Press reported that China was building a new 3,000-unit quarantine facility in the northern provincial capital of Hebei in response to the gradual increase in the case count.