A rchive Date
[ 13-05-2020 ]
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[ International Relations ]
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[ Canada ]
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[https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-key-dates-in-the-failure-to-stop-covid-19
Key dates in the failure to stop COVID-19
Lorrie Goldstein
May 12, 2020
Don’t believe politicians and public health experts - in Canada or anywhere else - when they suggest the COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented disaster that could not have been foreseen or stopped.
There are, in fact, several significant dates when COVID-19 could have been contained in China, before becoming a global catastrophe that has infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, including more than 5,000 Canadians, while causing the worst economic crash since the Great Depression.
The first date, as reported by the National Review, was Dec. 30, 2019.
That’s when Dr. Li Wenliang posted on a popular social media website what doctors in Wuhan, a city of 11 million and a major transportation hub, had been encountering for a month.
They were seeing an increasing number of patients showing symptoms of a new, SARS-like coronavirus, capable of human-to-human transmission, which appeared to have emerged from a local wet market. Dr. Wenliang, would later die from what we now call COVID-19, likely contracted from his patients.
Instead of acting on these accurate findings by Dr. Wenliang and his colleagues, which could have stopped the spread of the virus in the crucial first weeks of the outbreak, Chinese authorities arrested them. Dr. Wenliang was forced to renounce the truth.
For three weeks, until Jan. 20, Wuhan authorities repeatedly denied and suppressed medical evidence that COVID-19 was being transmitted from person to person, as millions of people entered and left Wuhan in the lead up to Chinese lunar new year celebrations.
Thousands were spreading the virus, unknowingly, domestically and internationally, through air travel.
During this period, on Jan. 14, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO), headed by Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, made a major blunder.
In a tweet, the WHO repeated China’s false claim, without independent verification, that there was no clear evidence COVID-19 was being transmitted from person to person. That resulted in many governments letting down their guard.
We now know, as reported by the Associated Press, that by Jan. 14, Chinese authorities had concluded COVID-19 was spreading by human transmission, which they did not publicly acknowledge for six more days.
During that period, as reported by Sam Cooper of Global News - and backed up by subsequent media reports of U.S. intelligence findings - China launched a global campaign to buy and ship to China what would soon become desperately-needed pandemic medical supplies from other countries.
In Canada, while the Trudeau government donated 16 tonnes of pandemic supplies to China, China arranged to ship at least 100 tonnes of Canadian pandemic supplies to China, according to Global.
On Jan. 23, three days after China’s government finally admitted human transmission of COVID-19, it began locking down Wuhan, to high praise on Jan. 29 from the WHO’s Tedros and in Canada, from Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam, an advisor to the WHO.
But by then, it was too late. The virus had been spreading globally since December from its original epicentre in Wuhan.
As late as Feb. 26, Dr. Howard Njoo, deputy chief public health officer, testified before the Commons committee on health that Canada had contained the outbreak.
Within weeks, the Trudeau government would shut down the Canada-U.S. border to non-essential traffic, impose new air travel restrictions, and, in concert with provincial and municipal governments, impose massive social distancing measures on Canadians, in a desperate bid to halt the spread of COVID-19
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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