Chinese virologist Jin Dong-Yan told Lusa that China “has not learned the lesson” from the pandemic and that the ‘zero covid’ policy was extended far beyond what was necessary due to “nationalist pride”.
Chinese authorities were “just trying to turn the page” after lifting restrictions to contain the novel coronavirus in late 2022, the University of Hong Kong professor complained.
That is, “nothing has been done” to “understand what went wrong and what should have been done better,” even so that humanity is “in a better position to prepare for the next pandemic,” Jin said. .
The virologist argued that the mistakes started when SARS-CoV-2 showed up in Wuhan, in November 2019: “they didn’t detect the outbreak early and didn’t realize that some people are highly contagious”.
“Maybe it was because they were too confident that everything was under control, thinking 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 really too late”. And even as hospitals [de Wuhan] were full of patients, they still did their best to hide it,” he complained.
However, the Chinese government has “presented as national heroes those who made these mistakes”, something Jin described as “really counterproductive”.
Not least because the virologist said he believes “it would have been possible to get the situation under control” had quarantine in Wuhan been introduced “much earlier, for example in December 2019”.
The University of Hong Kong professor recalled that until the end of 2021, with the emergence of Omicron, the Chinese region was “virtually free from the coronavirus for a relatively long period of time”.
With the new variant, “too contagious, too transmissible”, “the ‘zero covid’ policy no longer works,” Jin defended. And taking into account that Ómicron is “also less pathogenic,” the price society has to pay is “too high,” he added.
The “zero covid” policy included imposing lockdowns on entire neighborhoods or cities, which could take months, constant mass testing, and isolating all positive cases and direct contacts in designated facilities.
Yet China only left politics in December 2022, after a wave of protests in several major Chinese cities, in an unusual public display of disapproval of leader Xi Jinping’s policies.
Jin Dong-Yan defended that China stayed the course because of issues of “nationalist pride” and recalled that even after the policy was abandoned, authorities insisted “they were right at the time”.
But the virologist said he believes that if the government hadn’t “wasted so much money on 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 it. prepare for reopening.
Jin lamented that only China and Russia have so far failed to approve the vaccine produced by Pfizer-BioNTech.
Conspiracy theory about the United States
By mid-February, when China declared a “decisive victory” over the pandemic, the end of the “zero covid” policy had officially caused 83,150 deaths, a number experts said was “certainly unrealistic”.
“The data is definitely an underestimation of the true number,” Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist and statistician in the medical field, told Lusa, noting that lab tests to detect the virus “are not commonly performed in hospitals anymore,” so ” in most cases, hospitalizations and deaths from the disease [na China] are not laboratory confirmed”.
Chinese authorities have promoted 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 studied the coronavirus.” “It’s not that Americans are designing viruses to infect Chinese people,” he added.
On the other hand, the expert also described as “without evidence and baseless” the claims that a lab accident in Wuhan was “highly likely” at the root of the pandemic, voiced by FBI Director Christopher Wray in late February.
But the virologist admitted that “it’s the wrong policy [das autoridades chinesas] of being less open, less transparent, which gives room for this conspiracy theory to take flight”.
Source: DN
