BEIJING – Chinese authorities have refused to provide World Health Organization researchers with raw and personalized data on the first cases of Covid-19 that could help them determine how and when the coronavirus began to spread in China, according to WHO investigators who described heated discussions about the lack of details.
Chinese authorities rejected requests to provide such data on 174 cases of Covid-19 that they identified in the initial phase of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. The investigators are part of a WHO team that completed a mission this week. month in China to determine the origins of the pandemic.
Chinese officials and scientists provided their own extensive summaries and analysis of case data, WHO team members said. They also provided aggregated data and analyzes in retrospective searches on medical records in the months before the Wuhan outbreak was identified, saying they had found no evidence of the virus.
But the WHO team was not allowed to see the basic raw data from these retrospective studies, which could allow it to conduct its own analyzes of how early and extensively the virus started to spread in China, team members said. Member states generally provide this data – anonymous, but disaggregated so that investigators can see all other relevant details about each case – as part of WHO investigations, team members said.
“They showed us some examples, but this is not the same as doing all of them, which is a standard epidemiological investigation,” said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist on the WHO team. “So, you know, the interpretation of that data becomes more limited from our point of view, although the other side may see it as being very good.”