'Signal was ignored': Independent inquiry criticises China and WHO over COVID
A global inquiry has identified crucial failures in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic when Chinese authorities could have acted "more forcefully" to protect public health.
The inquiry, which reports to the World Health Organisation, has also found that most countries did not act on warnings about early cases and did not share information fast enough when cases emerged.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister and former head of UNDP Helen Clark has criticised China and other countries for being too slow to act on the spread of COVID-19.Credit:Kate Geraghty
The report also criticises the WHO for taking three weeks to form an emergency group to counter the virus and being too slow to declare the crisis to be a pandemic.
The findings are part of a second report from an ongoing inquiry chaired by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who said they would look further into the "coherence" of the health response.
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said there were "lost opportunities" in the early stages of the outbreak when basic public health measures should have been put in place at the earliest opportunity.
"While still collecting information, the panel is becoming more confident in its understanding of the early events in Wuhan, China, where the first presently known cluster of cases was identified," it said.
"What is clear to the panel is that public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January."
The report also finds fault with other countries for being too slow to respond when there was evidence of COVID-19 cases in a number of countries by the end of January last year.
"Public health containment measures should have been implemented immediately in any country with a likely case. They were not," it said.
"According to the information analysed by the panel, the reality is that only a minority of countries took full advantage of the information available to them to respond to the evidence of an emerging epidemic."
Information could have been shared "more widely and proactively" between countries, and authorities should have taken faster action to deploy containment measures whenever cases appeared.
The panel highlighted a briefing for the WHO executive board on February 4 that heard of 12,000 confirmed cases in China but only 176 in other countries, saying this was “definitive evidence” of human-to-human transmission.
This was a "clear signal to all countries" with even small numbers of cases that they needed to act quickly contain the spread.
"In far too many countries, this signal was ignored," the panel said.
David Crowe is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.