China, in Isolation

"I feel very lucky I didn't take part in the banquet, as I have two young kids and thought it was inconvenient to bring them along."
"There are now more than ten infections among my neighbours."
Sally Zhang, Baibuting resident, Wuhan, China

"The reason why the Baibuting community continued to host the banquet this year was based on the previous judgement that the spread of the epidemic was limited between humans, so there was not enough warning."
Zhou Xianwang, mayor, Wuhan

"There is no question that the Wuhan government underestimated the disease."
"The mayor of Wuhan has neither the expertise nor the willingness to follow health experts' advice." "His concern is that an escalation in disease prevention may hurt the local economy and social stability."
"In the current political atmosphere, which values obedience more than competence, local officials have an incentive to avoid taking responsibility."
Central government senior adviser

Officials in protective clothing are seen after passengers boarded a charter flight bound for CFB Trenton after arriving on a plane chartered by the United States government carrying U.S. and Canadian citizens home from Wuhan, China, at Vancouver International Airport in Richmond, B.C., on Friday February 7, 2020. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)

"There's a natural inclination for party officials at all levels to bury negative information and censor dissenting views irrespective of who's in charge in Beijing."
"But under Xi Jinping, the inclination to suppress has become endemic and, in this case, contributed to a prolonged period of inaction that allowed the virus to spread."
Jude Blanchette, China analyst, CSIS, Washington think-tank

Ambulance personnel have their temperatures checked Thursday at the southern entry gate to Wenzhou, China. (Anna Fifield/The Washington Post)

No one is to blame, everyone is to blame. The Chinese central government of the Peoples Republic of China under its Chinese Communist governance erred wildly in thinking it could shield the news of a new viral outbreak from the international news in the interests of subduing the outbreak quietly, yet taking no early practical steps to isolate it and prevent the novel coronavirus that began its life in Wuhan from spreading, for fear of disrupting its already globally weakened economy.

There is some credit due the government for taking decisive steps, by making accessible the sequenced coronavirus gene from researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai, thus helping international researchers in their new emergency search for an antiviral drug that would address the threat of the coronavirus. That and the decision to embark on a hospital-building enterprise to accommodate thousands of hospital beds in astoundingly short order.

All of this, unfortunately, while impressive, being too little, and much too late. When the first emergence of an unusual pneumonia-like virus surfaced with a few puzzling cases the time was right to take immediate steps to ensure that viral communication would be kept to an absolute minimum. The Wuhan tradition of an annual mass banquet in its Bailbuting district proceeded at a time when a public medical alert should have been initiated.

In the district about 40,000 families prepared specialty dishes with patriotic names to serve one another. Transmission followed, predictably, with the district facing a rising toll of infected citizens where notices in red and black letters noting "fever block" were pasted on 57 communal stairwells. The novel coronavirus is of epidemic proportions with no signs of levelling off. The world's second-largest economy is in distress mode, and Chinese are looking at a government of obvious incompetence.

Before the banquet took place, city authorities had been informed about the spreading virus three weeks previously. Wuhan authorities simply spoke of a virus as "pneumonia of unidentified causes" in early December, claiming that there was no person-to-person viral communication. In fact authorities in Wuhan were informed the virus could be spread between humans. A pulmonologist at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, Zhao Jianping claimed to have diagnosed suspected coronavirus cases as early as December 17. "We didn't expect the disease to be so severe, but we were sure it could spread from human to human", he said.

Immediately reporting it to the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Two days before the banquet, six days before the city was quarantined, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reporting to the mayor, stated that on January 15 the virus may have been spread by human contact. Between January 2 and 16 there was no official count of cases, coinciding with the two-week period when Wuhan residents in their millions began returning home in a yearly Chinese new year pilgrimage.

A vigil for Li Wenliang, who died on Friday morning, was held in Hong Kong  Reuters

During that period of no news of new cases, new cases were surging. The Chinese news website Caixin quoted a Wuhan radiologist at a public hospital as saying he had identified 50 new cases on January 15 alone. While the official Xinhua news agency ran a story on a doctor who had fallen ill with the virus on January 11. That doctor, whose discussions with colleagues featured his concerns over the appearance of the new virus, to alert them, was warned by government agents to stop spreading 'false rumours'. He died of the virus a day ago.

And then there is the role of the World Health Organization.  "The WHO is so much in thrall to China's influence, they have felt compelled to stay close to China's line on this crisis", confided one UN diplomat. "China wanted to downplay this virus and the WHO felt it had to fall into line, at least until its position became untenable." And that's about where the situation in China is right now.

According to Gabriel Leung, dean of the University of Hong Kong's medical school, in Wuhan, as of January 31, about 75,800 people in Wuhan alone may have been infected, as opposed to the official number of confirmed cases in all of China, of 11,791 on the same day. Today, in one day in China, 86 people died of the coronavirus effects. The total contamination in China officially stands at 34,878, with 6,106 in severe condition, and a total to date of 724 deaths.

The World Dream is locked in isolation with some passengers reported with the virus; seen here docked at Kai Tak Cruise Terminal in Hong Kong on Thursday. Photo by PHILIP FONG/AFP via Getty Images