Excerpts from an extensive article at the National Institute of Health (Because this is an extended quote, I’ve chosen to italicize it rather than indent for readability.).
Citations omitted:
THE SARS EPIDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH IN CHINA: A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE
This “strange disease” alerted Chinese health personnel as early as mid-December. On January 2, a team of health experts was sent to Heyuan and diagnosed the disease as an infection caused by a certain virus… A Chinese physician, who was in charge of treating a patient from Heyuan in a hospital in Guangzhou, quickly reported the disease to a local anti-epidemic station… We have reason to believe that the local anti-epidemic station alerted the provincial health bureau about the disease,
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On January 27, the report was sent to the provincial health bureau and, presumably, to the Ministry of Health in Beijing. The report was marked “top secret,” which meant that only top provincial health officials could open it.
Further government reaction to the emerging disease, however, was delayed by the problems of information flow within the Chinese hierarchy. For 3 days, there were no authorized provincial health officials available to open the document. After the document was finally read, the provincial bureau distributed a bulletin to hospitals across the province. However, few health workers were alerted by the bulletin because most were on vacation for the Chinese New Year. In the meantime, the public was kept uninformed about the disease.
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[U]ntil such time as the Ministry chose to make information about the disease public, any physician or journalist who reported on the disease would risk being persecuted for leaking state secrets. A virtual news blackout about SARS thus continued well into February.
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On February 11, Guangdong health officials finally broke the silence by holding press conferences about the disease.
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From then on, information about the disease was reported to the public through the news media. Yet in the meantime, the government played down the risk of the illness. Guangzhou city government on February 11 went so far as to announce the illness was “comprehensively” under effective control. As a result, while the panic was temporarily allayed, the public also lost vigilance about the disease. When some reports began to question the government’s handling of the outbreak, the provincial propaganda bureau again halted reporting on the disease on February 23. This news blackout continued during the run-up to the National People’s Congress in March, and government authorities shared little information with the World Health Organization until early April.
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In fact, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention did not issue a nationwide bulletin to hospitals on how to prevent the ailment from spreading until April 3, and it was not until mid-April that the government formally listed SARS as a disease to be closely monitored and reported on a daily basis under the Law of Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases.
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[T]here is no doubt that [CCP] government inaction paralleled by the absence of an effective response to the initial outbreak resulted in a crisis.
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On May 12, the very same day that Premier Wen Jiabao released the new regulations to promote openness, the Beijing Morning News carried an article on how people who spread “rumors” about SARS could be jailed for up to 5 years.
You will have noted a few minor discrepancies in this account from our current situation. Locations, precise dates, leadership names. That’s because this 2004 article describes events that took place during the SARS outbreak in 2003. The players change, but the game remains the same.
Given the CCP’s track record, the World Health Organization’s deference regarding the 2019 virus is unconscionable. If you read the whole article, you’ll likely come away with the impression it was better handled in 2003.
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