Coronavirus: The Blame Game
On the 31st of December 2019, the government of China announced to the world that they have discovered a novel pneumonia-like disease that is now known as Covid-19.
They informed the World Health Organisation (WHO) that the novel disease had similar symptoms to SARS, a viral respiratory disease that caused a minor epidemic in China and surrounding countries between the years 2002 to 2004. They also mentioned that the virus was not capable of human to human contraction. On 29th January 2020, Director-General of WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus met with the Chinese President Xi Jinping and formally addressed the globe that the Chinese government was conducting a phenomenal job to eradicate the virus, Covid-19.
At the present, we are still handling the crisis ofCovid-19. Currently, out of the 193 countries, only 13 countries have no confirmed cases of Covid-19. There can be many reasons as to why Covid-19 is still a problem but a major reason can be due to misinformation.
According to new sources, the first case of coronavirus in China was on the 17th of November and by the 20th of December, there were 60 confirmed cases.By then it is clear that community transmission of the disease is evident. Official documents by the Chinese government to the WHO states that the first recorded case of Covid-19 was on the 8th of December with no human transmission. Later to acknowledge human transmission on 21st of January however, by then several other countries have already reported their first Covid-19 cases. In addition, several articles online claim the Chinese government was silencing Covid-19 whistle-blowers.
Why did it take the Chinese government several weeks to report to the world about this dangerous disease and why the misleading information? We all know that every action has a consequence. What’s China’s consequence for playing such a dangerous game, shouldn’t the WHO address this issue?
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