WHO criticizes China's lack of transparency regarding Covid

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"China underestimates the number of deaths";

"You are not being transparent with the data";

"Officials must share more information in real time about infections."

These three statements have come out publicly in the last two weeks from the

(WHO).

That the powerful UN agency that watches over world health concerns questions the lack of transparency of the Beijing regime is news because until now it had not done so.

The critical attitude of the international organization, practically absent during the three years of the pandemic, comes as the Asian giant fights against an unprecedented explosion of infections and deaths from Covid after breaking down all the barriers of the 'Covid zero' policy and deciding that It is time to learn to live with the virus.

"We believe that the current figures being released in China underestimate the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, in terms of ICU admissions, particularly in terms of death,"

, director of emergencies at the hospital, said Wednesday.

WHO.

Before Ryan's appearance, the agency released a report on the situation in China, stating that the data they were handling

and that the positive cases had been caused by the BA.5.2 and BF sublineages. .7 from Ómicron, which were previously circulating in other countries.

From Beijing, whose scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention have held a couple of meetings this week with WHO experts (on Tuesday and Thursday), they insist daily that

and that, since the outbreak of the pandemic, they have always "adhered to an open and transparent attitude".

A position that does not fit with reality when it is the director of the health agency himself, Dr.

, who goes out on Twitter to give a touch to China reiterating the "importance of being transparent and regularly sharing data".

It also does not help that the Chinese government has only

at the beginning of December, while numerous reports of saturated emergencies and bodies that are accumulating in some morgues do not stop, with forecasts from various studies that in more than a million deaths this year from Covid if the waves that are to come are not stopped.

The WHO is not convinced that the most populous country in the world has redefined deaths from Covid as those due to pneumonia or respiratory failure caused by the virus, and not those caused by underlying diseases aggravated after infection.

in a patient with an infection," recommends a Geneva-based organization that has been walking a fragile line throughout the pandemic, always very close to the official discourse of the second world power.

At the end of January 2020, when China had already closed Wuhan due to the first known outbreak of Covid, the WHO publicly praised Beijing for its rapid response to the new coronavirus, thanking it for its transparency and for immediately sharing the genetic map of SARS- CoV-2.

A few months later, an investigation by the Associated Press (AP) agency revealed that

key information during the critical first days of the pandemic.

The AP had access to several recordings of meetings of WHO technicians in Geneva in which they privately complained that, during the key week of January 6, 2020, China was not sharing the data necessary to assess the risk of the virus to the world. rest of the world.

for more than a week after three Chinese laboratories had already deciphered it.

"We are receiving very minimal information," protested, according to the recordings collected, the epidemiologist

, who was appointed WHO technical director for Covid-19.

Until January 30, 2020, the WHO did not declare a global emergency.

As the AP recordings pointed out, the organization later continued to praise China's management when it learned that the authorities of the Asian country had not made all the appropriate information available to them to study the real impact of the pandemic.

For the past three years,

to uncover the origin of the virus.

Even the health agency sent a team of the best virologists in the world to Wuhan in February 2021 to try to decipher the mystery.

In October of that year, the WHO announced the birth of a new team of researchers who would work with their Chinese counterparts to solve the origins of the virus.

More than a year later, the same unanswered questions remain.

The idyll between the WHO and China began to unravel last spring, when some public statements came out from Geneva questioning the 'Covid zero' strategy, which continued to confine millions of citizens every time an outbreak broke out, no matter how small.

"We have discussed this issue with Chinese experts and indicated that the approach will not be sustainable. I think a change would be very important," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the time.

Following his words,

, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, criticized Ghebreyesus for his "irresponsible comments."

In the end, after Omicron toppled draconian controls, and the biggest social protests in decades threatened political stability,

.

A measure that had long been called for both inside and outside its borders, but which has also been criticized for its abruptness and for having spent the last three years spending a fortune on controls and not on propping up the country's fragile health infrastructure.

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