Daily Times

10. Allegation: China was too late in disclosing information about human-to-human transmission. As a result, the US and the rest of the world had not gained enough knowledge about how contagious and deadly the virus was and therefore failed to respond quickly enough.

Reality Check:

The messages from China and the World Health Organization have been timely and strong. The US knows about the danger of the virus all along.

? It takes a rigorous scientific process to determine whether a new virus can be transmitted from person to person.

On 9 January, a Chinese expert group had already confirmed on the media that the pathogen was preliminarily determined as a novel coronavirus.

On 20 January, the high-level expert group of the National Health Commission informed the media that the novel coronavirus could be transmitted from person to person. On that day, the US reported no confirmed case.

On 23 January, China sent a powerful warning to the world by putting Wuhan, a city of 12 million people, under lockdown. On that day, the US reported only one case.

?On 22 January, WHO issued a warning about the potential risk of human-to-human transmission on its website.

On 27 January, WHO raised the level of risk posed by COVID-19 at a global level from moderate to high, noting the risk to be very high in China and high at a regional level.

On 30 January, the WHO International Health Regulations Emergency Committee held a meeting and declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

?The US was the first country to pull out personnel from its consulate-general in Wuhan and the first to announce entry restrictions on all Chinese citizens:

As early as on 25 January, the US announced the decision to close its consulate-general in Wuhan and pull out its staff;

On 2 February, the US announced the decision to close borders to all Chinese citizens and foreign nationals who had been to China within the prior 14 days, while it only had eight reported cases on that day.

?It was not until early March that the US government seriously acknowledged the danger and severity of the spread of the virus in the country.

?In an opinion article, Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned US economist and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, criticized the US government for making reckless charges against China, calling them illogical and dangerous. He said that the US government’s claim that China is the cause of America’s problems is a big lie and recalls the end of McCarthy era.

?The Taiwan authorities claimed that its CDC had warned WHO of the existence of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 in an email at the end of December 2019, but WHO withheld this information from the world. In response to this allegation, Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, clarified on 4 May that the email sent from Taiwan on 31 December 2019 was not a warning, but a request for more information on cases of atypical pneumonia reported by news sources.

11. Allegation: China is not transparent in data releasing. Its official numbers of confirmed cases and fatalities are too low to be true, and the real figures are at least 50 times more.

Reality Check: China has been fully open and transparent about its COVID-19 data. The figures can well stand the test of history.

?As of 21 January, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) started to update the public on a daily basis on the COVID-19 situation of the previous day on its official website and through its social media accounts. Starting from 27 January, the State Council inter-agency task force on COVID-19 has been holding daily press briefings to release key information and respond to questions from domestic and foreign media. More than 3,000 press conferences have been held at national and sub-national levels. Government officials, medical workers, experts and recovered patients engaged the media face-to-face without dodging any questions.

?These COVID-19 data are an important basis for China’s decision to pursue all-round reopening of the economy with necessary containment measures in place and to restore the normal economic and social order. One case in point is the lifting of the 76-day lockdown of Wuhan after a continuous drop in infections.

?China’s relatively low number of confirmed cases and fatalities was attributable to the most comprehensive, rigorous and thorough measures taken promptly by the Chinese government, such as completely shutting down the transportation out of Wuhan. The Science magazine estimated in one of its reports that these measures helped prevent at least 700,000 infections in China.

? The Chinese government always puts people first. In its fight against COVID-19, saving lives is the government’s number-one priority. China has expanded hospital admission and treatment to cover all those in need to cure and save as many patients as possible. All suspected cases and close contacts have been placed under quarantine at designated places to cut off the chain of transmission and stem the further spread of the virus. That is why China’s nationwide infection rate has stayed relatively low. In Hubei Province alone, over 3,600 patients aged 80 and above have been cured, including seven centenarians.

?On the evening of 22 January, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted in Geneva that China’s “cooperation and transparency is very, very commendable”. In an interview with US media in March, Dr. Bruce Aylward, Team Leader of the WHO-China Joint Mission on COVID-19, responded to questions about China’s official data by saying that he “didn’t see anything that suggested manipulation of numbers”.

?On 3 March, Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior advisor to the WHO Director-General, noted in an interview with US media VOX that China is not hiding anything. And the data he collected through talks with physicians from various hospitals and other stakeholders could help corroborate China’s data.

?On 28 April, Christoffer Koch and Ken Okamura, two economists from the US and the UK, jointly published a paper based on studies of the data from China, Italy and the US. They found that the confirmed infections in China match the distribution expected in Benford’s Law and are similar to those in the US and Italy. They thus concluded that there is no possibility of manipulation of figures.

?On 29 April, Yale Professor Nicholas A Christakis, co-author of the Nature magazine paper entitled Population Flow Drives Spatio-temporal Distribution of COVID-19 in China, tweeted that “Incidentally, this result sheds light on accuracy of Chinese COVID-19 reporting, because a totally different source of info (telco mobility) obtained from different source predicts case counts so well, in keeping with epidemiological expectations.”

?On 5 May, Dr. Gauden Galea, WHO representative in China, said that “The WHO has been in constant technical communication with China since January 3 on the severity, transmission dynamics and the possibility of sustained human-to-human transmission, the clinical course, and effectiveness of treatments, and the WHO has provided detailed information to the international community under the framework of the International Health Regulations (IHR).”

12. Allegation: Wuhan’s revision of the numbers of confirmed cases and fatalities shows again that China covered up a large number of cases in the early days of COVID-19.

Reality Check: The data revision by Wuhan is a common international practice. As a matter of fact, it proves that China is open, transparent and responsible.

?On 17 April, in accordance with the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, the Regulations on Preparedness for and Response to Emergent Public Health Hazards, the Regulations on the Implementation of the Statistics Law of the People’s Republic of China, and the Rules on the Administration of Death Information Registration (for Trial Implementation), Wuhan issued a notification, revising up confirmed cases by 325 to a total of 50,333, and fatal cases by 1,290 to a total of 3,869.

?It was out of a high sense of responsibility to history, to the people and to the lives lost to the coronavirus that Wuhan took the initiative to revise the numbers to reflect the facts it had gathered. The reason that caused the gap between the figures was four-fold:

First, when the city was first hit by the virus, hospitals were swamped due to the surge of patients. Some patients were thus unable to be hospitalized and passed away at home.

Second, during the peak of COVID-19, hospitals were running overloaded, and medical workers were preoccupied with providing treatment, which resulted in delayed, inadequate or inaccurate reporting of relevant cases.

Third, due to a subsequent rapid increase in medical institutions designated to treat COVID-19 patients, including both hospitals under the central, provincial, municipal and district governments, as well as hospitals run by companies, private hospitals and mobile hospitals, a small number of these institutions did not register with or report cases timely to the established information network.

Fourth, the information of some fatal cases was incomplete. Some of them were reported repeatedly or inaccurately.

?To ensure the accuracy of the revised numbers, Wuhan set up a task force to look into the big data and epidemiology of the epidemic. Through on-line means, it carefully compared the number of confirmed and fatal cases to de-duplicate and complete the information by making full use of the city’s epidemic big data system, funeral service information system, medical administration information system, and nucleic acid testing system for COVID-19. Through off-line means, it collected the full data from all places related to the disease without missing anyone, including fever clinics, hospitals, mobile hospitals, quarantine stations, communities having confirmed cases, as well as prisons, detention facilities, nursing homes and other special sites administered by government agencies of public security, judiciary and civil affairs. The information of every case was collected, and it was cross-checked with medical institutions, communities, community-level police stations, and patients’ employers and families to ensure that the information of every individual case is accurate.

?Revising statistical standards is a common international practice. For example, on 29 April, the UK government began to count fatal cases outside hospitals, and revised their figures accordingly. On 17 April, the Spanish government published an order for its autonomous regions to harmonize how they collect data and stated that the published numbers would be revised.