An internal US intelligence analysis has concluded that China's initial cover-up regarding the coronavirus pandemic outbreak was partly due to the efforts of local officials in Wuhan and Hubei Province to prevent information from reaching Beijing.
A report in The Telegraph stresses that the United States has not exonerated the Communist Party leadership from complicity, but notes that the matter is more nuanced than was initially thought.
Chuang Yin-ching, a senior official working for Taiwan’s Centres for Disease Control, related to The Telegraph that he was in Wuhan in January 2020, and met with local, regional, and national officials along with experts from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, to discuss the "new virus."
“Initially … the chairperson of the meeting, tried to deny human to human transmission but finally the person from the central government health authority said, ‘Why do you give an old conclusion? Now the conclusion is that limited human to human transmission cannot be excluded,’” said Chuang.
Nonetheless, Chuang noted that Chinese officials displayed no alarm at the situation, and he was invited to conduct a walking tour of Wuhan while he was there, with no one thinking to wear a face mask.
Chuang returned to Taiwan and raised the alarm, based on the scanty information he had managed to glean, and his government immediately triggered an "emergency pandemic plan" which has proved astonishingly effective. To date, Taiwan has recorded less than 500 cases of Covid-19, and only seven people have died.