Coronavirus: Is ‘China Covered Up the Coronavirus’ Narrative Real or Just Political Bias Misled by Politicians

2020-05-25

May 24, an article published in National Interest told some truth of the United States government’s anti-coronavirus activities and words to the public. The article is Don’t Listen to the ‘China Covered Up the Coronavirus’ Narrative, in which the author Mitchell Blatt said that China made some mistakes, as did every country, in responding to the coronavirus, but China’s overall response was more effective than most countries, with domestic quarantines of inter-city travelers, widespread mask-wearing, and a testing and tracing regime with access to a vast trove of data.

At the same time, Fukuyama, the chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest wrote that Before we can think about changing China, we need to change the United States and try to restore its position as a global beacon of liberal democratic values around the world. And he said Unfortunately, over the past three and a half years, the United States has been doing everything it can to weaken itself. It has elected a leader who revels in demonizing his domestic opponents far more than his foreign rivals, who has blithely thrown away the moral high ground that used to be the foundation of American global power, and who has governed the country with such incompetence during the largest crisis of the past three generations that it is no longer taken seriously by either friends or enemies. While democracies as a group have not done worse than authoritarian governments in controlling the crisis, China is able to present itself as having outperformed the United States, and that bilateral comparison is the one that people are paying attention to around the world right now.

Since President Donald Trump’s early optimism that coronavirus was “under control” and “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero” has proven to be false hope, he has been trying to turn China into a scapegoat. He is attacking China and blaming them for the fact that America has 1.6 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and ninety-five thousand deaths, even though many of the reasons for the severe outbreak here have to do with mistakes by governors, government agencies, and Donald Trump himself.

China, for example, did not decide to continue to allow 140,000 travelers to fly into the U.S. from Italy, twice as many as the amount that came in from China, and 1.7 million from the rest of Europe, for weeks after Italy had become a hot spot, without so much as temperature checks or fourteen-day quarantines upon arrival. And the claims of a “cover-up” are inaccurate. They are nothing but a cover for politicians and countries with antagonistic relationships towards China to defend themselves in front of their domestic publics and to pressure China internationally. And meanwhile, to attract the supporters’ eyes for 2020 election. Epidemic became a politic issue, and was used for any politic purposes by those politicians, only real scientists are worry about the public health and spread of virus.

The claims of a “cover-up” are increasingly vague — Trump blamed “some wacko in China” on Twitter on May 20 which made him like a wacko and idiot to the public. Anyway, the claims typically rest on a few premises:

The claim that China undercounted the number of cases and deaths
the claim that China did not respond quickly enough
the claim that China denied that the virus could spread between humans
outrage over the detention of Dr. Li Wenliang and others

Arguments one through three are largely inaccurate, while point four is a valid criticism but not evidence of a cover-up and not relevant to the global spread of coronavirus. Overall, China’s critics are holding China to a higher degree of competence and transparency than they are holding democratic countries.

Apart from the political purpose, most US politicians are pomposity, conceited and overconfident and will not to admit the achievements of the country they always look down on. And the big gap make them unhappy. Mitchell Blatt pointed some more evidences.

There is little evidence that China fabricated or intentionally undercounted deaths in most of the country, which is what a “cover-up” would describe. It is true that the official number of deaths in China, like every other country, almost certainly is missing some people who died at home or undiagnosed.

The New York Times reported in April that coronavirus cases across the country were not being counted because tests were lacking, and many likely coronavirus deaths in February and early March were attributed to the flu. Officials in California were able to confirm the deaths of coronavirus as early as February 6, three weeks before the first recorded death. Data on Florida’s coronavirus dashboard shows people reporting coronavirus-like symptoms as early as January 1. The manager who oversaw that data was fired after protesting an order to remove some of the data.

Undercounting is taking place in Europe, too. In Madrid, over three thousand people had died in nursing homes without having been tested. The Economist reported in its April 18 issue, “France’s figures include deaths that occur in care homes—nearly half the total—white Britain’s do not.” Given what we know about how the elderly are most at risk and how nursing homes have become hotbeds everywhere, not counting deaths of their residents would have a significant impact and would be something a regime could do if it wanted to artificially limit its reported numbers.

Icelandic data suggests that as many as half of people with coronavirus show no symptoms, which means that they would not be tested in most countries. The Catalonia region of Spain also revised its numbers upward, doubling them, in April. The Daily Beast reported on May 13 that the Trump administration is pressing the CDC to change its reporting methodology to exclude coronavirus deaths for which the victim was not tested.

Coronavirus is new to all of the world, especially to the doctors both in China and the other countries. From the notes of Wuhan doctors, some pneumonia cases in December but attributed it to an unknown cause as the coronavirus had not been discovered at that point. American doctors could not recognize that some of their patients had coronavirus in February and March, either.

Dr. Li Wenliang messaged colleagues about the similarities to SARS on December 30. He was detained on January 3 and released the same day with a warning but no formal charges. Virus samples were shipped to Fudan University in Shanghai on January 5, and the results of the tests, that it was SARS-CoV2, or the coronavirus, were announced to the world on January 9.

National governments, such as the U.S. government, have taken longer than one week to respond even after already knowing that coronavirus was a threat. Even in March, Trump was comparing the coronavirus to the flu. It took him twenty days to put any restrictions on flights from Italy after Italy began locking down cities. And our president Trump played golf in two days of 23 and 24 as there was no any virus crisis. Yes, as he said, he did not take any responsibility to it, China must. But China is not master of US, and Xi is not the president to US.

Finally, China was downplaying the potential for human transmission amongst people who showed symptoms. It was not until January 20, that they announced that the virus had been confirmed through study to be communicable, although most viruses, particularly a virus in the coronavirus group, should be assumed to be potentially communicable, barring evidence to the contrary, which is exactly why Taiwanese and Hong Kongese health officials were already working on that assumption before January 20.

At the time, however, no doctors and scientists could have been expected to know that coronavirus spreads between people who do not show symptoms of being sick. By late January, there were apparent cases of asymptomatic transmission being observed, and China’s health ministry did issue a warning about asymptomatic transmission on January 31. But it took months for the United States CDC or the Surgeon General, or health organizations in other Western countries, to recommend widespread mask-wearing.

That—and the high R0—were the main reasons coronavirus spread so quickly and so widely. The 2003 outbreak of SARS did not spread asymptomatically or pre-symptomatically. That, also, is likely why foreign governments did not respond quickly or deliberately enough.

It could be that governments are fallible, that no government could be expected to respond perfectly to even the most trivial challenges, let alone a crisis of unprecedented scale. It could be that coronavirus is the “disease x”—the disease that both spreads extremely quickly and kills at a relatively high rate.

To hold that China could have or should have been able to know from day one that these cases of pneumonia were actually coming from a new virus, or that it should have known the virus spread through the breath of apparently healthy people, and that it should have been able to track every case of the virus, is, somewhat ironically, to hold China to higher standards than the most developed democratic countries in the world. When China mishandles a pandemic, it is ascribed to malfeasance; when the United States and Europe do, it is the ordinary, expected incompetence.

It’s not only an inaccurate narrative, and one that is being used to absolve domestic leaders of responsibility for their mistakes, but it is also in a sense an anti-democracy narrative.

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