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WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left) meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping (right) on January 28 in Beijing. Speaking at a press conference in Geneva on January 14, Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of the WHO’s emerging diseases unit, was quoted by Reuters as saying there had been “limited human-to-human transmission” in Wuhan. The Chinese government and the WHO also downplayed growing concerns about whether the disease could be transmitted readily between humans. Yet during this critical week a large annual legislative meeting went ahead and a now infamous pre-Chinese new year dinner, attended by 40,000 families, was held in the city on January 18. In reaction to the news from Bangkok and Tokyo, epidemiologists at Imperial College London released a study estimating that for the virus to be spreading beyond Chinese borders, there had to be about 4,000 symptomatic people in Wuhan. Part 6: What Africa taught us about coronavirus, and other lessons the world has learnt Part 5: How New York’s missteps let Covid-19 overwhelm the US Part 3: Why coronavirus exposed Europe's weaknesses Part 1: China and Covid-19: What went wrong in Wuhan But could it have been averted? A unique FT investigation examines what went wrong - and right - as Covid-19 spread across the world
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The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 1m people across the globe. “By the time the situation in Wuhan was totally out of control, other cities just one hour’s drive away were totally unprepared . . . A lot of things could have been avoided if people had only been told the truth about the virus.”īLAME GAME China and the WHO’s united front The message there was the same: “They told me they needed to wait for orders from higher level municipal officials” in Huanggang, the city that encompasses Mr Gao’s village. On January 23, the same day that Wuhan was subjected to a strict quarantine, he ventured one rung higher up China’s administrative hierarchy, visiting the county government. “People in my village were still visiting relatives and gathering as normal.” “They told me they hadn’t received any orders from higher level, so there was nothing they could do,” he told the Financial Times. But for the first three weeks of January, Chinese officials said there were only a few dozen confirmed cases and downplayed the risk of human transmission.Īghast to find life in his village unchanged, Mr Gao confronted local officials. The Chinese government had formally notified the World Health Organization on January 3 that a “severe pneumonia of unknown etiology” - science speak for a mysterious new respiratory disease - had been discovered in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province with a population of 11m. He arrived in his home village, about 120km from Wuhan, on January 21, just a day after the Chinese government finally broke its silence about the epidemic and confirmed the virus was spreading human-to-human. As doubts about the true size of the outbreak grew through January, Mr Gao, 33, decided to rush home from southern Guangdong province where he was working as a welder.