by
Les May
WRITING on
the Conservative Home blog Damian
Green
MP has said ‘The
World Health Organisation, as the Coronavirus crisis has developed,
has seemed to be completely indulgent towards the Chinese authorities
while being ever-ready (as they should be) to criticise other
governments,
and
that
the Chinese authorities were ‘dilatory
in informing the WHO
about the outbreak’.
Green’s
claims seem to be written more from prejudice than a quest for
accuracy.
This
is what the Al
Jazeera
news channel has to say.
‘On
December 31
last year, China alerted the WHO to several cases of unusual
pneumonia in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people. The virus was
unknown.’
And
the WHO tends to confirm this.
The
full genetic sequence of the new virus, essential for the development
of a test for infection by the virus, was released on 5 January 2020
based on a sample swab taken from a patient in December 2018
(probably 26 December)
You will note that at that time it was referred to as the ‘Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus’ which is unsurprising as it was previously and unknown virus.
This
points to doctors and researchers in China being initially mystified
by the new illness and working to find out more about it, rather than
to ‘dilatoriness’.
As for the WHO being ‘indulgent’
to China I’m not sure what Green has in mind.
Green
of course is not the only politician to blame China for the ongoing
pandemic, Donald
Trump
initially adopted a similar stance but now seems to have chosen to
direct his ire at the WHO for
‘Calling
it wrong’,
which
is a bit rich coming from a man who takes no notice of anyone who
actually knows what they are talking about.
I
take
a different view. For 76 days after 23 January China conducted a
massive experiment on its own population at no cost to us or the rest
of the world. To tackle the Covid19
pandemic it introduced what has come to be known as a ‘lockdown’
instructing the residents of Wuhan
not to leave their homes. As
this seemed to be effective in reducing the infection rate other
countries introduced similar measures. Having
reduced the
number
of person to person transmission of the virus to a very low level,
China is now conducting a second experiment by a phased lifting the
restrictions on the population, again at no cost to us or anyone else
in the world. They
are experimenting with one possible ‘Exit
Strategy’.
We
should be watching what is happening in China in
the next few weeks
very carefully to
see if it works.
Thankfully
we have not emulated China’s methods of imposing a 76 day lockdown.
But there is the dilemma. The
more complete the lockdown the more effective at
reducing the infection rate it
will be and the
shorter the time it will be necessary
for it to be in place. China
is totalitarian and coercive, we are a democracy, and work by
persuasion and consent. If we want to prove that our system is
superior we’ve got to
accept
social distancing and no unnecessary journeys out of the house.
The
more we flout these rules the less effective the lockdown will be and
the
longer it will have to last
to
achieve the desired result.
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