In reality, the truth is somewhere in the middle. But increasingly, more and more evidence being reported in the western press - by mainstream outlets like the AP, as well as the newspapers mentioned above - appears to suggest that suspicions about China's deceptions have proven true. The notion that Chinese officials 'reacted slowly' or 'dragged their feet' isn't accurate. It looks more like Beijing knew what they were dealing with right away, but decided to withhold that information from the Chinese people and the international community because - because, why, exactly?
It's not exactly clear. By failing to act right away, Beijing passed on a chance to cut the global case total by as much as two-thirds, according to some models cited in an AP report. As for why Beijing might have purposefully allowed a pandemic to blossom, well...that should be abundantly clear by now.
In a bombshell report that exposes not just Beijing's lies, but the WHO's complicity in those lies, the AP obtained documents allegedly proving that President Xi and the leadership were aware of human-to-human transmission and the potential for a pandemic six days earlier than previously believed.
And instead of acting, they chose to sit on their hands, allowing the virus to continue spreading freely in Wuhan until Jan. 20, when President Xi delivered his first warning to the public.
"This is tremendous," said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system."That's not all. Some experts believe that the CPC leadership did act during the six day lag, taking subtler steps to erect more mitigation efforts, while waiting to inform the public to avoid "mass hysteria."
Given the fact that Beijing managed to leverage the Red Army and close down half of the largest country on Earth, something tells us the public reaction to news of the virus - and the government's heavy handed efforts to contain it - wasn't high up on the Party's list of concerns.
What's more, the report suggests that the government essentially bullied doctors into silence, something that Beijing has vehemently denied, despite the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, a doctor who was punished for warning about the virus, then died fighting it, becoming a symbol of Beijing's mishandling of the outbreak.
"Doctors in Wuhan were afraid," said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. "It was truly intimidation of an entire profession."And they might have waited longer, even, if the first international confirmed case, found in Thailand on Jan. 13, didn't force the Chinese government to act.
Still, the fact that China lied - and continues to lie - can no longer be disputed, even as Beijing assured the AP that they reported the outbreak to the WHO as soon as they were aware.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/shocking-report-shows-beijing-withheld-critical-coronavirus-evidence-6-days
Related:
WHO Blocked Doctors From Urging Border Controls To Stop Spread Of COVID-19
[Posted at the SpookyWeather blog, April 17, 2020.]
