Massive leak reveals China’s mistakes and lies that led to the coronavirus pandemic

[Chris Smith]

• China has claimed transparency and professionalism in dealing with the novel coronavirus since the early days of the Wuhan outbreak.
• A massive leak informally called The Wuhan Files proves that was not the case.
• Despite its claims, China seems to have underreported the number of daily cases and deaths on multiple occasions, misrepresenting to the world the true impact of the novel illness.
• The documents also show the Hubei province where Wuhan is located was dealing with a major "flu" outbreak in early December 2019 that was 20 times worse than the same period the year before.

China seemed to be a lot more transparent and organized when it announced in late 2019 that it discovered a new respiratory illness could lead to pneumonia and death. The infection originated in animals, it likely came from the Wuhan market, and did not spread to other humans. That’s what the early reports said, at least. But in the weeks and months that followed, we learned that China’s initial response to the illness that would turn into a massive pandemic wasn’t all that much better than its response to SARS in 2002. China was faster at acknowledging the illness this time around, but it wasn't fast enough. Chinese officials' delayed response led to the virus outbreaks in China and around the world. China was late to acknowledge human-to-human transmission, and the World Health Organization (WHO) was equally late with measures that could have allowed the world to respond better.

Since then, China has often praised its own efforts at handling the Wuhan outbreak while seeking to find an alternate origin story for the emergence of the virus. The latest attempt came in November when China pointed fingers at Europe and the Indian subcontinent as potential sources for SARS-CoV-2. There’s no evidence to support the claims. But there is evidence to show that the virus that fueled the pandemic is a mutated version of SARS-CoV-2 that originates from China. That D614G mutation then hit Europe and the US much harder than the Wuhan outbreak, prompting more speculation that China had not been honest about the severity of the Wuhan spread.

One year later, the world now has access to the biggest leak of China’s mishandling of the early Wuhan epidemic. It’s all thanks to CNN’s exclusive story based on a treasure trove of internal documents that have been leaked by a whistleblower.

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Massive leak reveals China’s mistakes and lies that led to the coronavirus pandemic originally appeared on BGR.com on Tue, 1 Dec 2020 at 10:02:48 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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