Remember when I said that the communist government of China sucks? Well, they do. Day by day more information comes out that confirms the Chinese government did the world no favors in its handling the COVID-19 outbreak.
The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that China knew this novel coronavirus was "likely" to become a pandemic six days before Chinese President/Dictator Xi Jinping warned the public.
According to the AP:
In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.
President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.
Think about that. Chinese officials allowed a "mass banquet" and "millions" of people to travel through for Chinese New Year, all while knowing of a then-possible pandemic coming down the pike. If that isn't a human rights violation against the entire world, I'm not quite sure what is.
Zuo-Feng Zhang, a professor of Epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), commented that if China had acted those six days earlier, the world - and to a degree China - could've avoided a lot of the trouble that ensued by not taking action.
"This is tremendous,” he said. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system."
As the days pass, we're learning a lot of things could have been avoided if the Chinese government had acted more responsibly. Alas, they didn't, and here we are.