China’s coronavirus response slowed by bureaucracy, unstable funding as government never empowered lower level officials
- China’s spending on health has grown 10 times since 2002 with thousands of local centres for disease control and prevention established across the country
- But unstable funding, complicated bureaucracy and an insufficient labour force still left China ill-equipped to deal with the latest coronavirus outbreak
The 2002 outbreak of Sars provided the first real test of China’s decades-old Soviet style public health system, but despite some improvement made in the aftermath, the country’s disease control and prevention system has again been proven to be too weak to be effective against the deadlier coronavirus epidemic 18 years later.
Yet unstable annual funding, complicated bureaucracy and an insufficient number of trained workers still made it ill-equipped for the latest coronavirus outbreak, according to experts as well as government budgets and statistical yearbooks reviewed by the South China Morning Post.
The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) – akin to the US government’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that was founded after the second world war – was heavily criticised for being slow to warn people about Sars.
The China CDC did not issue a bulletin to hospitals on how to contain Sars until April 2003, five months after the earliest case was identified. The outbreak eventually killed 349 people in China before it died out, according to the World Health Organisation.