BEIJING: In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from the coronavirus, the city of Wuhan, at the epicenter of the disease, hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began travelling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

That delay, from Jan 14 to Jan 20, was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time. China’s attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected more than two million people and taken more than 128,000 lives.

This is tremendous, said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. If they had taken action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local transmission. Yet during that time, from Jan 5 to Jan 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2020