SHANGHAI (CHINA) – Beijing’s latest plans to overhaul its disease control system are unlikely to improve its ability to handle future virus outbreaks, said experts within and outside the country.
The reform measures, which were announced in late May, do not fix all the flaws exposed by the new coronavirus and fail to address the issues of secrecy and censorship that many experts believe turned an isolated outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan into a pandemic.
“The biggest problem in China is (local governments) are afraid that epidemics can impact social stability,” said Yang Gonghuan, a former deputy head of the China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing. “So they don’t want reporters to speak and don’t want people like Li Wenliang to speak.”
Li, a doctor in Wuhan, was reprimanded by police for “spreading rumours” when he tried to raise the alarm about the virus, which he later died from.
China’s authorities took 16 days to shut down Wuhan after the new coronavirus was first identified there in early January. Health minister Ma Xiaowei said this month that the struggle to curb the virus “exposed some problems and shortcomings”.
China plans to give hundreds of Centres for Disease Control (CDCs) – which coordinate public health across the country – more power to detect and respond quickly to new outbreaks as well as better access to hospitals and clinics.
The reforms, which are so far only draft guidelines with no details on timelines or funding, were met with scepticism overseas.
“It is very clear from the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak and the COVID outbreak that the political, institutional factors have complicated and compromised the whole government’s ability to deal with the outbreak,” said Yanzhong Huang, a public health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank.
LEARNING FROM SARS
The first case of abnormal pneumonia was diagnosed in Wuhan at the end of December, and the new coronavirus was identified as the cause on Jan. 7.
Wuhan was locked down on Jan. 23, but a study from Britain’s University of Southampton suggested it could have reduced infections by as much as 95% if it had done so two weeks earlier.
China has also failed to address calls from health advisers and experts for a more independent CDC system capable of responding more rapidly to new health risks.
After SARS outbreak, China loosened state secrecy restrictions, established an online, real-time reporting system to ensure that new outbreaks were disclosed quickly. It covered nearly all of the country’s hospitals and clinics by 2007.
But many of the reforms later proved to be temporary, and Wuhan repeated many of the same mistakes made during SARS outbreak, with local authorities covering up news of the virus.
China needs to improve the flow of information and prevent local leaders from censoring citizens and journalists, said Huang, who has studied China’s response to epidemics over the past 20 years.
(Photos syndicated via Reuters)
This story has been edited by BH staff and is published from a syndicated field
