Thread by @FLAHAULT

1/15 - “The first days and weeks of the pandemic were crucial. So why was no action taken? Through a six-month investigation in the city, the FT has uncovered the answers.[...] This is the first part of a major Financial Times series.
ft.com/content/82574e…

2/15 - “During the investigation, some of the people approached were threatened by police, who said that the FT had come to the city with “malicious intent”, raising doubts about whether Xi Jinping’s administration is really willing to facilitate the impartial investigation.”

3/15 - “For the first three weeks of January, Chinese officials said there were only a few dozen confirmed cases and downplayed the risk of human transmission.”

4/15 - “It was shocking. By the time the situation in Wuhan was totally out of control, other cities just one hour’s drive away were totally unprepared . . . A lot of things could have been avoided if people had only been told the truth about the virus.”

5/15 - “The sudden appearance of Wuhan-linked cases in Bangkok and, a few days later, Tokyo suggested that Wuhan’s official case count, which stayed at only a few dozen through mid-January, was nonsense.”

6/15 - “Yet during this critical week a large annual legislative meeting went ahead and a now infamous pre-Chinese new year dinner, attended by 40,000 families, was held in the city on January 18.”

7/15 - “The Chinese government and the WHO also downplayed growing concerns about whether the disease could be transmitted readily between humans. Zhong Nanshan, a government adviser, finally confirmed on January 20 that the virus could actually spread between people.”

8/15 - “President Xi Jinping’s administration sought to downplay the potential threat of the virus and initially lobbied against “excessive actions”, such as the early declaration of a global health emergency and travel bans aimed at Chinese nationals.”

9/15 - “It’s like David and Goliath, you’ve got big China and you’ve got Tedros . . . there’s an asymmetry of power there.”

10/15 - “The government knew how bad the virus was at an early stage but didn’t give a public warning and chose to cover up the truth. That has cost so many lives.”

11/15 - “Finding the original coronavirus patient — the man, woman or child who ate the bat-bitten cat, pangolin or other as yet undetermined intermediate host — is as difficult as finding the first person to contract a seasonal flu.”

12/15 - ““Patient Zero could be someone who spread to another 30 patients but never knew he was infected.”

13/15 - “The Chinese government, especially at local levels, lacks the ability to effectively communicate with the public in crisis situations.”

14/15 - “One of the biggest mysteries about the initial stages of the pandemic is why Wuhan-sized clusters did not emerge all over the country.”

15/15 - “Every province in China got infected within a month [of the Wuhan outbreak] and [their official case counts] generally settled into triple figures because their lockdowns were harsh. So it did spread across China, but they just shut it down.”