foreignpolicy | While the novel coronavirus is changing the world, China is trying to
do the same. Already a serious strategic rival of the United States with
considerable international clout, it’s now moving into a new
field—health.
After initial denials and cover-ups, China successfully contained the
COVID-19 outbreak—but not before it had exported many cases to the rest
of the world. Today, despite the falsehoods it initially passed on,
which played a critical role in delaying global response, it’s trying to
leverage its reputed success story into a stronger position on
international health bodies.
Most critically, Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the
World Health Organization (WHO), which both receives funding from China
and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels.
Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until
Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end
of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from
the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese
doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and
reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international
concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do
so.
After the Beijing visit, though, WHO said in a statement
that it appreciated “especially the commitment from top leadership, and
the transparency they have demonstrated.” Only after the meeting did it
declared, on Jan. 30, a public health emergency of international
concern. And after China reported only a few new cases each day, WHO
declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11—even though it had spread
globally weeks before.
WHO was keen to broadcast Beijing’s message. “In the face of a
previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most
ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,”
WHO experts said in their February report on the mission to China.
The country had gained “invaluable time for the response” in an
“all-of-government and all-of society approach” that has averted or
delayed hundreds of thousands of cases, protecting the global community
and “creating a stronger first line of defense against international
spread.”
China’s “uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical
measures” provides vital lessons for the global response, the WHO report
said. Beijing’s strategy “demonstrated that containment can be adapted
and successfully operationalized in a wide range of settings.” However,
while recommending China’s epidemic control policy to the world, WHO
neglected the negative externalities—from economic damage to the failure
to treat many non-coronavirus patients, psychological woes, and human
rights costs.
It’s not surprising that China’s containment strategy was effective,
said Richard Neher, virologist at the University of Basel. “The big
lockdown, centralized quarantine, and contact tracing for sure
accelerated the decline,” Neher said. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of
the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law at
Georgetown University, points to “major human rights” concerns with the
lockdown techniques pioneered in China and now—to a different
degree—adopted in many nations. Gostin recommends standard public health
measures like testing, treatment, contact tracing, and isolation or
quarantine “as scientifically justified.”
While the rising number of cases elsewhere shows that China isn’t
alone in failing in the initial stages of an outbreak, the full story of
the Chinese loss will probably never be known—and certainly not
recognized by WHO or other bodies.
One reason is that official data from China is often highly
dubious—which can lead to ill-advised health policies in other
countries, since studies based on information from China are the first
used to understand COVID-19. Countless cases of people dying at home in
Wuhan—some being described in social media posts—will probably never go
into the statistics. And while a report by Caixin
on the Chinese province of Heilongjiang said that a considerable
percentage of asymptomatic cases has not been reported—which amounts to
about 50 percent more known infections in China, according to a South China Morning Post report on classified government data—WHO takes numbers reported by Beijing at face value.
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