The Chinese authorities refused to provide WHO with data on the first cases of Covid in Wuhan. This data could help figure out how the virus began to spread.

The Chinese authorities refused to provide the World Health Organization experts with initial data on the first cases of coronavirus. This is reported by The Wall Street Journal, citing WHO experts who traveled to China to clarify the circumstances of the virus.

According to experts, the Chinese side rejected requests for data on the 174 first cases of the disease recorded in Wuhan in December 2019.

Instead, China only gave the experts ready-made results of studies of these cases made by Chinese scientists for review. This has prevented WHO experts from conducting their own analysis of when and how the virus spread in the early stages of existence.

“They showed us a couple of examples, but it’s not the same as if we analyzed them all, which is standard practice for epidemiological investigations,” said Dominic Dwyer, one of the WHO experts.

• WHO experts traveled to Wuhan to study the origin of the virus at the end of January. The preliminary report from the trip stated that the virus was of natural origin and that it had entered humans from bats through some intermediate link, which was probably some other animal.
• The Chinese authorities have been repeatedly criticized for not taking proper measures to combat it in the early stages of the spread of the virus and hiding the scale of the epidemic from other countries.