Inside Wuhan’s failed Covid response – and how the pandemic could have been avoided
▻https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/covid-origins-wuhan-theory-book-dali-yang
À propos de Wuhan: How the #Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, de Dali Yang.
The suspected coronavirus was swiftly confirmed by Vision Medicals, a Guangzhou-based lab, which performed genome sequencing lung fluid from “Patient A”, a 65-year-old man with severe pneumonia and “multiple scattered patchy faint opacities in both lungs” and who was not responding to drugs.
The book notes that “due to the sensitivity of the diagnostic results”, the lab only provided confirmation of the positive test result for a SARS-like coronavirus to the hospital by phone and not in writing.
The team had discovered it was 81 per cent similar to the first SARS coronavirus outbreak.
Screenshots that appeared on social media between an anonymous scientist at the lab, known as ‘Little Mountain Dog’, and her boss showed that they immediately recognised the coronavirus “should be treated in the same class as the plague” for prevention and control purposes.
Yet despite the mounting evidence pointing to potential catastrophe, the local CDC was slow to react.
The growing number of cases were not fed, as they should have been, into the National Notifiable Infectious Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS), created after the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic killed close to 800 people globally.
The system – the largest in the world and a source of national pride – had broken down. Gao Fu, the director general of the national CDC, only learned of the latest Wuhan outbreak on social media on December 30.
Although he swiftly set in motion a series of emergency responses by the National Health Commission and China CDC, the next crucial few weeks were characterised by missteps, censorship, political interests and counterproductive moves that failed to prevent the uncontrolled spread of the virus.
