Transparency a key lesson learned from Sars outbreak in mainland China
Ten years ago, after mounting criticism from governments around the world and the World Health Organisation, which were concerned about a possible cover-up of the severity of severe acute respiratory syndrome, the government changed its policy and revealed the true severity of the outbreak.
Sars taught China many lessons, one of the most important being that increased transparency would have made handling the epidemic much easier, says former Ministry of Health spokesman Mao Qunan.
Ten years ago, after mounting criticism from governments around the world and the World Health Organisation, which were concerned about a possible cover-up of the severity of severe acute respiratory syndrome, the government changed its policy and revealed the true severity of the outbreak.
On April 19, 2003, Premier Wen Jiabao warned that local officials who failed to report Sars cases in a timely and accurate manner would face severe consequences.
A day later, health minister Zhang Wenkang was dismissed and the ministry started to release daily updates on the epidemic.
"In retrospect, if we had disclosed information earlier we would have handled the situation better, but we did not have any experience," Mao said.
The ministry did not have a direct reporting system for infectious diseases at the time and did not have exact information to report to the public, he said.
"The information we got in the ministry was fragmented," Mao said. "We now know that panic and fear was more likely to spread among the public about such an unknown disease, but we did not have a standard public disclosure channel and the information we gave was not complete before the daily reporting [started]."