A panel of experts commissioned by the WHO has criticized China and other countries for not moving to stem the initial outbreak of COVID-19 earlier, and questioned whether the UN health agency should have labeled it a pandemic sooner.
In a report issued on Monday, the panel, led by former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, said that there were “lost opportunities to apply basic public health measures at the earliest opportunity” and that Chinese authorities could have applied their efforts “more forcefully” in January last year shortly after the novel coronavirus began sickening clusters of people.
“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 pandemic,” the panel said.
Photo: AFP
The experts also wondered why the WHO did not declare a global public health emergency sooner.
The UN health agency convened its emergency committee on Jan. 22, but did not characterize the emerging pandemic as an international emergency until a week later.
At the time, the WHO said its expert committee was divided on whether a global emergency should be declared.
“One more question is whether it would have helped if WHO used the word pandemic earlier than it did,” the panel said.
The WHO did not describe the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic until March 11, weeks after the virus had begun causing explosive outbreaks in numerous continents, meeting the agency’s own definition for a flu pandemic.
As COVID-19 began spreading across the globe, the WHO’s top experts disputed how infectious it was, saying it was not as contagious as flu and that people without symptoms only rarely spread the virus.
Scientists have since concluded that COVID-19 transmits even quicker than the flu and that a significant proportion of spread is from people who do not appear to be sick.
Over the past year, the WHO has come under heavy criticism for its handling of the response to COVID-19. US President Trump slammed the UN health agency for “colluding” with China to cover up the extent of the initial outbreak before halting US funding for the WHO and pulling the country out of the organization.
An Associated Press investigation in June last year found that the WHO repeatedly lauded China in public, while officials privately complained that Chinese officials stalled on sharing critical epidemic information with them.
Although the panel concluded that “many countries took minimal action to prevent the spread [of COVID-19] internally and internationally,” it did not name specific countries.
It also declined to call out the WHO for its failure to more sharply criticize countries for their missteps instead of lauding countries for their response efforts.
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