The Chinese Government's four months of lies, cover-ups, and disastrous public health failures are directly responsible for the global Coronavirus outbreak. This is the story of exactly how.
As far back as November 17th, Chinese government data uncovered by the South China Morning Post identifies a 55 year-old man from Hubei Province as the disease's possible "Patient Zero," but it is far from conclusive. This does suggest, however, that the government knew that doctors were dealing with a new virus far earlier than it let on.
A study in the medical journal The Lancet, meanwhile, identified the first known patient who died of the virus as having contracted the disease on December 1st:
The symptom onset date of the first patient identified was Dec 1, 2019. None of his family members developed fever or any respiratory symptoms. No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases. The first fatal case, who had continuous exposure to the market, was admitted to hospital because of a 7-day history of fever, cough, and dyspnoea. 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalised in the isolation ward.
This suggests that not only did China know much earlier than it admitted that it was dealing with a new disease, but that this disease was extremely contagious and potentially very deadly.
On December 10th, a 57 year-old seafood merchant named Wei Guixian who worked in the city of Wuhan's Huanan market went to a clinic for treatment of what she thought was a cold. She went back to work the next day, but two days later she went to the hospital with what doctors identified as bronchitis. Antibiotics didn't work, though, and a week later she was back in the hospital, barely conscious and near death.
By December 21st, a number of other Huanan market vendors reported the same symptoms, and by the end of the week, nearly 200 people from Wuhan were infected. At that point, doctors knew that they were dealing with a new virus, but the Chinese government prevented them from telling their superiors. In fact, the government prevented them from telling anyone and accuses them of "spreading rumors," which in China is a grave accusation that can be punished severely.
The doctors were largely scared into silence.
On Christmas Day, December 25th, government officials quarantined the staff of two hospitals in Wuhan while still refusing to admit that anything is wrong. In reality, it was almost certain that the government knew then that the disease was spreading from human to human and that it was extremely contagious. Still, it pretended that nothing was wrong.
Two days later, Dr. Zhang Jixian of Yunnan University informed the government that his research has revealed that the mysterious disease in Wuhan is a novel coronavirus--the first concrete evidence that top officials in China knew that they had a potential pandemic on their hands. Yet they still were silencing doctors who were responding to it.
On December 29th, Dr. Ai Fen, the head of the Emergency Department at Wuhan Central Hospital told colleagues and superiors about just how dangerous this new coronavirus was, and she was immediately reprimanded for it and told to keep quiet. After eight of her colleagues shared her warnings, Chinese Police took them in for questioning and warned them to keep their mouths shut.
Dr. Fen eventually went public with the efforts to silence her from speaking the truth, and she has now disappeared.
A day after Dr. Fen warned colleagues, one of them Dr. Li Wenliang took to the Chinese social media app WeChat to issue a warning about the virus. He too was rounded up for questioning and a month later died, supposedly of Coronavirus.
On New Year's Eve, December 31st, China first informed the World Health Organization (WHO)...a full three weeks after it was almost certainly aware of the severity of this new disease. On the same day, however, the government issues a statement downplaying the risk by indicating that “the investigation so far has not found any obvious human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infection.”
This was flat-out lie and the Chinese government knew it.
The same day, health officials in Taiwan reported to the WHO evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus, its warnings apparently went unheeded. Two weeks later, using information supplied only by the Chinese, the WHO tweeted "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."
On New Year's Day, January 1st, Chinese officials finally closed the Huanan market in Wuhan, indicating that they knew both the severity of the virus and its epicenter. However, on the same day an official with the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered laboratories in the region examining Coronavirus to stop and to destroy all of their samples. Why? The researchers had discovered that this new virus is similar to SARS.
People in Wuhan clearly understood the threat, as The New York Times reports that cell phone data showed that 175,000 people left the city that day with many flying out of China altogether. China did nothing to stop them even though it knew Wuhan was the center of a dangerous and growing pandemic.
On January 2nd, researchers successfully mapped the Coronavirus genome, but the government suppressed that information for a week, finally telling the world that indeed it had identified a novel coronavirus for the first time on January 9th--a full three weeks after it rather obviously knew about it and more than a week after informing the World Health Organization.
Two days later, the Communist Party of China began a week of emergency meetings in Wuhan, during which the city's health commission laughably insisted that there were no new cases of the virus. In reality, there were hundreds, if not thousands.
Doctors were simply not allowed to report them.
On January 13th, the first reported Coronavirus case outside of China was identified in Thailand, meaning that not only was the virus spreading from person to person, it had left its epicenter in Wuhan and country of origin in China and was now potentially traveling around the world.
Two days later, a 35 year-old man got off a plane from Wuhan in Seattle. He was America's first known Coronavirus patient and the country's likely "Patient Zero."
The following day, Japan announced a case. The virus was spreading much faster than anyone had feared. Still, the Chinese government was sticking to its lie, saying that “existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.”
As a result of this, thousands more people left Wuhan and China thinking that they can't spread the virus to other people.
This belief prompted more than 40,000 families in Wuhan to gather for a massive potluck dinner on January 18th to celebrate the upcoming Lunar New Year. Even though government officials knew that the virus was spreading from person to person and that Wuhan was its epicenter, nothing was done to stop this or even to require that people take basic protective and sanitary precautions.
Lunar New Year in China is a massive holiday, with hundreds of millions of people traveling during their lengthy vacations. In fact, it's known as the annual Great Lunar New Year Migration. Workers travel home to be with families, families travel to visit relatives in other parts of the country, and millions vacation outside of China. Although the government knew about the severity of Coronavirus, it did nothing to stop this Great Migration for days.
Only on January 23rd did it place four cities, including Wuhan, on lockdown. Still, an estimated five million people were allowed to leave the city without being checked for the virus. Given the rate at which it was spreading, it was likely that at least 100,000 to 200,000 people who were carrying Coronavirus were allowed to spread it around China and, crucially, across the globe.
Inexplicably, an emergency committee convened by the WHO, still acting on information from China, said on January 23rd that Coronavirus was not a public health emergency of international concern.
"The advice to the [director-general], which is provided by the emergency committee" is that it is "too early to consider that this event is a public health emergency of international concern," said the committee's chairman, Dr. Didier Houssin.
It very obviously was, but the WHO had fallen victim to China's misinformation campaign. Part of this was a continued conspiracy of silence. On January 27th, Wuhan's Mayor, Zhou Xianwang, admitted during an interview with state media that his superiors ordered him not to say anything about Coronavirus for a month.
On, February 1st, a salesman from Wuhan named Fang Bin uploaded a video to YouTube in which he described the severity of the virus and appeared to show dead bodies lying in the streets.
Two days after that video hit the internet, America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mobilized a team to travel to China to investigate the severity of the Wuhan outbreak. The Chinese government refused to allow them into the country.
On February 6th, another citizen journalist, Chen Qiushi, disappeared after traveling to Wuhan in late January to uncover the truth about Coronavirus.
"I will use my camera to document what is really happening," he said in his first YouTube video. "I promise I won't… cover up the truth."
He vanished about a week later.
On February 12th, the CDC again readied a team for deployment to China to study the virus but again the Chinese government denied their entry.
Three days later, Chinese state media published a speech that Chinese President Xi Jinping gave on February 3rd in which he admitted that the knew the severity of the threat of Coronavirus in early January--while China was telling the world that it was not serious, not especially contagious, and under control.
Those were outright lies, and they spread the disease faster than anything else, allowing it to grow into the pandemic that it is today and quite literally infecting the world.