the meme that China continued international flights from Wuhan AFTER shutting down domestic flights on Jan 23 has spread like wildfire and is now widely believed by US public. It seemed implausible to me and is untrue. I'll provide sources to support in this small thread.
2/ claim originated in an April 5 column in the (London) Times by Niall Ferguson who asserted that thetimes.co.uk/edition/commen… "regular direct flights from Wuhan continued to run to London, Paris, Rome, New York and San Francisco throughout January and in some cases into February" 
3/ Daniel Bell asked Ferguson for evidence supporting his claim, describing the exchange in an interesting Apr 21 article danielabell.com/2020/04/21/did….
4/ Bell checked Ferguson's supposed support and discovered that all the flights that Ferguson had supposed to have left had actually been cancelled. Here is a partial excerpt. Bell nicely describes his verification process.
5/ on Apr 22, Bell published an update, reporting that Ferguson had "concede[d] that he was wrong to allege that regular flights left from Wuhan to the rest of the world after Jan. 23rd, which is what I had asked him about", giving link.
6/ Ferguson's update (niallferguson.com/blog#.Xp76zROZ…) contained a grudging concession that "data from sensors tracking actual flight paths would seem to indicate that no flights left from Wuhan itself to other countries in the world after January 23" but argued his error was irrelevant
7/ it is relevant. We've seen too many cases where govts and intel agencies have used false claims to ratchet up international tensions. Does no harm and perhaps some good to pick each such spitball from US intel agencies off the wall.
