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Coronavirus: Why did China’s multimillion-dollar early warning system fail?
- In March 2019 the Chinese infectious diseases watchdog said a Sars-like epidemic would not happen again
- Did this new disease spread so quickly because health experts who visited Wuhan, where it first emerged, hid the truth?
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As China battles to contain the new coronavirus epidemic, questions are being asked about the failure of its multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art early warning system, set up in the wake of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak which cost the country 349 lives and more than 200 billion yuan (US$28.6 billion) in economic losses.
Just one year ago, in March 2019, Gao Fu, director of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told reporters that, while a virus could emerge at any time, it would not in future cause an epidemic on the scale of Sars in 2002-03.
The claim has backfired badly. The new virus – which emerged in Wuhan, capital of the central Chinese province of Hubei, in December and has now been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation – is from the same family of germs as Sars and, like its close cousin 17 years ago, probably originated in wild animals.
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The Sars experience drove Beijing’s leadership to overhaul its infectious disease control system in a bid to prevent a future epidemic and, according to a former CDC official, in its early years at least the system worked well.
“We spent 730 million yuan to build a reporting and early warning system for the CDC after Sars,” Yang Gonghuan, former CDC deputy director, said.
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“It did well for the avian flu and plague, although they were of much smaller scale than the coronavirus.”
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