Opinion | How China is losing global trust and goodwill over its handling of the coronavirus crisis

As the number of reported coronavirus cases in China has slowed, many have been wondering whether the worst may be over. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed? Perhaps the world and the media have overreacted to an outbreak no more threatening than a new flu strain.

Serious doubts about the veracity of official Chinese public health data are making it nearly impossible to draw firm conclusions about the scope and scale of the epidemic. Covid-19 infection rates, mortality, recovery, methods of transmission, incubation periods, and even screening methods have all been thrown into doubt. With this lack of confidence will come significant political fallout.

This crisis could have been a major turning point in Beijing’s quest to assume a leadership role in world affairs. Instead, a lack of transparency is poisoning the well of global goodwill and rekindling concerns about China’s control (and manipulation) of information, its influence over the World Health Organisation and its reliability in a crisis.

Take even the most basic data on infection rates, for example. The statistics were already not following the expected exponential trajectory of epidemics and then diagnostic criteria were abruptly changed. That led to a surge of over 15,000 new patients in one day. Then, about a week later, the case definitions were revised again, and the numbers plummeted to barely a few hundred.

Medical professionals still can’t seem to agree on whether symptoms, chest images or blood tests are sufficient diagnostic tools, but two months into the crisis, this is an unexpected problem to encounter, one with dramatic implications for the stemming of the epidemic.