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The Sunday Paper – Who Knew What When: The International Transmission of Information on the COVID-19 Outbreak

Dan Ciuriak writing in a Policy Brief for the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada makes three important points about the early onset of the COVID-19 pandemic:

  1. There was no global information asymmetry as early as December 31st 2019. The world knew as much as China did at that point
  2. Information available on that date was sufficient to enable countries to plan a response which would have been one appropriate to any other airborne respiratory disease
  3. The prevention of a global pandemic was almost certainly impossible given the ‘stealth’ nature of how, we now know, the disease progresses

From the report here’s the key paragraph “As of 31 December 2019, the news of the yet-to-be-identified pandemic-to-be was all over the world. It was on Chinese state media, in the Hong Kong press, on social media in mainland China and outside of mainland China (quoted in fact in the United States) and in official communications (e.g., in Canada). It was duly noted by agencies set up to monitor infectious diseases, duly noted by national authorities responsible for infectious disease control, and already acted on by mainland China’s closest neighbors, Hong Kong and Taiwan.”

Governments then that have had or are still having a ‘bad’ pandemic that insist on blaming China for a lack of warning are maliciously twisting facts in an attempt to distract from their own shortcomings.

As Mr. Ciuriak concludes “.., the scale of the pandemic is a function of policy choices made independently by governments and health experts around the world based on the same and sufficient information.We all have the COVID-19 crisis that we “chose” through our governance mechanisms.”

You might want to ponder that inconvenient truth next time you hear a politician claim that somehow they were swept away by a tide of events they were unprepared for. The claim is false, and most know it; which makes its repetition all the more callous and unforgivable.

You can read the full brief at Who Knew What? When?

Happy Sunday.

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