As the world is recovering from COVID-19 pandemic, memories of sorrow won’t dissipate easily from people’s minds. It is the faults from many procedures to handle this pandemic that caused more innocent people to die, for example, the weakness of global cooperation WHO, non-transparency in many countries, policy mistakes from some leaders and so on. In this post, situations in China will be mainly discussed.
Of course, faults from governments, medical areas and academia were combined together. Governments in China, to a certain degree, cccccccounccccaeled the information, not only for the outside world, but also their own people. Most people didn’t know what was going on in January, 2020. Only governors on the first line, very senior governors, doctors, nurses and officially-dispatched experts knew more about the pandemic. The public were as optimistic as usual. The medical area and academia weren’t independent from politics, meaning that they couldn’t publish data about viruses without permissions, otherwise penalties would fall on traitors. For example, one professor Dr. Zhang’s laboratory had been shut down for his leak on the genetic sequence of coronavirus.
Besides, the extent of global cooperation nowadays is not enough to handle world-wide pandemics. WHO needed to “suck up” member countries to coax them to cooperate. So in interviews, WHO officials would always keep at the same line as foreign affairs of member countries. For instance, WHO kept the same tone as China on whether there were human-to-human transmission in January 2020, with the same vagueness. This is true for all the other member countries as well. On global pandemic issues in history, such world organizations could not work together in much transparency. Because of the independence of each member, WHO or UN is not powerful enough to fix hard problems right now.
At last, as the consequence of China’s threats on coronavirus, with much vagueness and concealing. The confirmed cases were much under-estimated because they needed to get approval from leaders in hospitals and governments. Aside from data about cases, the research on viruses is also restricted by governments, like who could do the research, what could be shown to the outside or the public.
Apparently, the whole world needs to be more transparent and responsible to handle the next global pandemic better, which is sure to happen, just a matter of time. But it’s such a pity that this world is getting towards the opposite now.
