The Chinese virologist Jin Dong-Yan told Lusa that China “did not learn the lesson” given by the pandemic and that the “zero covid” policy lasted much longer than necessary due to “nationalist pride”.
The Chinese authorities “tried to simply turn the page” after lifting, at the end of 2022, the restrictions imposed to try to contain the new coronavirus, lamented the professor at the University of Hong Kong.
That is, “nothing has been done” to “understand what went wrong and what should have been done better,” yet humanity is “in a better position to prepare for the next pandemic,” Jin said.
The virologist argued that the errors began when SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, in November 2019: “they did not detect the outbreak at an early stage and did not realize that some people are highly infectious.”
“Maybe it was because they were too sure everything was under control, because they thought it was just bird flu,” Jin said, referring to the H5N1 virus, which killed six people in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2002.
The result, the expert recalled, was that the World Health Organization was only informed “when it was too late.” “And even when hospitals [de Wuhan] they were full of patients, they were still doing everything they could to hide it,” he lamented.
However, the Chinese government has “presented those who made these mistakes as national heroes,” which Jin described as “really counterproductive.”
Especially since the virologist said he believed that “it would have been possible to control the situation” if the quarantine had been implemented in Wuhan “much earlier, for example in December 2019.”
The professor from the University of Hong Kong recalled that the Chinese region “was practically free of the coronavirus for a relatively long period”, until the end of 2021, with the emergence of Omicron.
With the new variant, “too infectious, too transmissible”, “the ‘zero covid’ policy no longer works,” Jin defended. And considering that Omicron is “also less pathogenic,” the price to be paid by society “is too high,” he added.
The ‘covid zero’ policy included the imposition of lockdowns on entire neighborhoods or cities, which could take months, constant mass testing, and the isolation of all positive cases and direct contacts at designated facilities.
Still, China only abandoned the policy in December 2022, after a wave of protests in several major Chinese cities, in a rare public display of disapproval of leader Xi Jinping’s policies.
Jin Dong-Yan defended that China stayed the course for reasons of “nationalist pride” and recalled that, even after abandoning politics, the authorities continue to insist that “they had been right at that time.”
But the virologist said he believed that if the government “had not spent so much money testing the entire population, it could have used these resources to strengthen the health system and buy more antivirals and more effective vaccines” to prepare for the reopening.
Jin regretted that so far only China and Russia have not approved the vaccine produced by Pfizer-BioNTech.
By mid-February, when China declared a “decisive victory” against the pandemic, the end of the ‘covid zero’ policy had officially caused 83,150 deaths, a figure that experts described as “certainly short” of reality.
“The data is certainly an underestimate of the true number,” epidemiologist and medical statistician Ben Cowling told Lusa, noting that laboratory tests to detect the virus “are no longer frequently performed in hospitals.” reason why “the majority of the cases, hospitalizations and deaths by the illness [na China] They have not been laboratory confirmed.
Chinese authorities have been promoting a conspiracy theory accusing the United States of developing SARS-CoV-2 at the Fort Detrick military laboratory as a biological weapon.
An “absurd” theory, says Jin Dong-Yan, since “no one at Fort Detrick was studying the coronavirus.” “It’s not that the Americans are designing viruses to infect the Chinese,” he added.
On the other hand, the expert also described as “without evidence and unfounded” the accusations that a laboratory accident in Wuhan was “very likely” at the origin of the pandemic, made at the end of February by the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray. .
But the virologist admitted that “it is the wrong policy [das autoridades chinesas] of being less open, less transparent, which leaves room for this conspiracy theory to take off.”
Source: TSF
