One of China’s leading scientists defended the country’s delays in raising a global alarm in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, saying officials were initially unsure whether the pathogen was infectious among humans because close contacts from the first patients did not appear to be getting sick.
In the early days of 2020, after the mysterious pneumonia cluster emerged in central China’s Wuhan city, Chinese experts quarantined 700 close contacts of the first patients – including 400 medical professionals who cared for them – but none showed signs of illness. .
This prompted experts to postpone the conclusion that the coronavirus was transmissible between humans, said Liang Wannian, a senior official at the National Health Commission who oversaw the response to China’s virus until September.
“In early January, none of the two dozen cases – and then increased to four dozen – fit those criteria,” said Liang in an exclusive interview on Tuesday with Bloomberg News in Beijing. “Our appeal at the time was that there was no clear evidence of person-to-person transmission.”
Only on January 20 did China confirm that the virus can be transmitted between humans, after part of the medical team was infected. By then, the situation had gotten out of hand: days later, Wuhan and Hubei province were forced into a draconian blockade when infections increased and hospitals were overwhelmed.
China has faced strong criticism for those lost days. The initial minimization of the severity of the pathogen’s threat allowed Covid-19 to jump quickly across borders to become a pandemic that infected more than 86 million people and killed more than 1.8 million.
It is now known that many patients with Covid-19 are asymptomatic, which may have explained why the quarantined intimate contacts of these first patients did not appear to fall ill.
Liang’s comments are the most detailed public statements by Chinese officials at the time, describing the circumstances of the onset of the crisis.
Medical staff arrive with a suspected Covid-19 patient at Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in January 2020.
Photographer: Hector Retamal / AFP / Getty Images
Shifting Narrative
Some governments, however, acted much faster than China. Taiwan prevented a major outbreak by imposing border controls and other strict restrictions in January.
Taiwanese health officials visited Wuhan in the beginning and realized that some of the first patients were unrelated to the wet market, suspected of being the place where people were becoming infected. This led them to conclude that the human-to-human transmission was taking place.
In the face of global acrimony, China sought to change the narrative about the origins of the virus, with state media and government officials defending the possibility that the pathogen did not arise only in the Asian country.
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Liang, a public health veteran who also oversaw Beijing’s response to the SARS outbreak in 2003, agrees with the theory.
He said that while many speculations focused on wild animals in the market serving as intermediate hosts for the virus that was then passed on to humans, most of the first patients were traders who sold seafood there.
“Our hypothesis was that they mainly sold animals or meat, but that was not the case,” said Liang. “We need to study where the virus came from at the Huanan Seafood Market: is it animals or other goods carried by the cold chain or carried by people? The market is probably not at the beginning of the chain. “
Political Divisions
The lack of definitive solutions to the mystery has fueled the political divisions created by the pandemic, particularly between China and the United States. The Trump administration said the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where many coronaviruses were studied – – a scenario that Liang said was “zero Percent”Chance to be true.
The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Photographer: Hector Retamal / AFP / Getty Images
China’s actions have not helped to dispel distrust. Representatives and scientists from the World Health Organization visited Wuhan in January and February, but were prevented from entering the Wuhan market to conduct investigations.
The difficulties continued, with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying on Tuesday that China delayed the trip of experts sent to the Asian country to investigate the origins of the virus. Chinese officials have not yet finalized permission to allow WHO staff to enter the country, despite months of negotiation and planning.
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Liang said during the interview that the WHO investigation “will begin very soon” in China. Among the works that will be carried out will be the analysis of data and samples taken from the Wuhan market in early 2020, before being fully disinfected.
Liang, who left his job with the National Health Commission in China in September and joined the newly founded Vaning School of Public Health at Tsinghua University in Beijing, rejected claims that the country has not been open enough.
Even so, he acknowledged that the lack of international exposure among many of China’s public health doctors and clinicians can hinder effective communication.
“We must step up efforts to cultivate talents and skills to familiarize them with international rules and allow them to communicate” and be better understood, said Liang.
– With the help of Tom Mackenzie, Dong Lyu and Claire Che