by Vijay Prashad
Part 2 - Emergence
Doctors in Wuhan observed an unusual kind of pneumonia in late December. On December 31, a high-level team arrived from Beijing to investigate the reports coming from the hospitals. That day, on the last day of 2019, the Chinese authorities informed the Beijing office of the WHO of “cases of pneumonia unknown etiology [medical term for cause].”
On January 2, according to the WHO’s situation report, “the incident management system was activated across the three levels of WHO (country office, regional office and headquarters).” Four countries had by January 20 reported incidents of what would later be known as COVID-19—China, Thailand, Japan, and South Korea. Six people had died in Wuhan City.
On January 4, the WHO announced publicly that the Chinese authorities had informed it of “a cluster of pneumonia cases—with no deaths—in Wuhan.” This was also reported by the WHO on its official Twitter account.
The next day, on January 5, the WHO published its first risk assessment. “There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported cluster of pneumonia of unknown etiology,” the WHO wrote. “The symptoms reported among the patients are common to several respiratory diseases, and pneumonia is common in the winter season; however, the occurrence of 44 cases of pneumonia requiring hospitalization clustered in space and time should be handled prudently.”
It is important to know that the population of Wuhan City is roughly 11 million and of Hubei Province is roughly 58 million. The 44 cases of what was then called pneumonia were of concern, but there was not—at that time—an imperative to sound a global alarm.
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