A hospital in Wuhan, a city in China where the coronavirus appeared.
AFP
China could have spared many patients if it had reacted earlier to the appearance of the new coronavirus, the country’s most famous epidemiologist said on Thursday.
Zhong Nanshan, who heads the Covid-19 team of experts at the Ministry of Health, said the epidemic was “a hard lesson” for the country.
“If we had taken strict preventive measures in early December or even early January, we would have greatly reduced the number of sick,” he said at a press conference.
The new coronavirus was discovered in early December in Wuhan, in the center of the country.
After first ensuring that the virus was not transmitted between humans, Beijing placed the city and its region in quarantine from January 23, blocking more than 50 million inhabitants at the epicenter of the epidemic.
The coronavirus has infected more than 78,000 people in China since December, 2,700 of them fatally. In the rest of the world, 3,600 people were infected, and 50 died.
The Chinese authorities have been criticized for the slowness of their initial reaction and even for trying to suppress the information. In Wuhan, whistleblowers were summoned by the police, who accused them of spreading rumors.
The death of one of them, Doctor Li Wenliang, who died of the virus in early February, sparked an unusual outburst on Chinese social media against the regime.
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