zlacker

It's not just 14th Jan. The WHO had more than sufficient data at its disposal to avoid making misleading statements. All warnings from Taiwan in December were actively ignored.

https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/taiwan-wa...

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3904054

Please note that the WHO confirmation statement on 22nd Jan came about after independent confirmation of human to human transmission and only after China's health ministry itself confirmed human to human transmission on Jan 20th. Just a mere week after strong denial, the casualties could not be hidden anymore after several whistleblowers spoke up and China was forced to backtrack.

The WHO merely acknowledged what China stated with a wishy-washy "more data is needed". I suspect if China hadn't itself come clean they would have simply followed what the CCP stated well into the future!

If the WHO had chosen to acknowledge Taiwan's concern in December, performed the most minimum of followups and raised the alarm early, this disaster could have been nipped in the bud. A lot of second and third-world nations put faith in the WHO and outside the EU and the US, the anger at the WHO is palpable.

>>lenkit+(OP)
What would the anti-China xenophobes be saying if WHO were to say, without sufficient evidence, that human-to-human transmission was happening and it turned out to be mistaken?

Being skeptical is acceptable but not to the extent of rejecting the evidentiary process.

Also, Taiwan News is notably anti-China and is associated with Taiwanese nationalists.

>>crater+Jz
The WHO could have chosen not to ignore Taiwan's warnings and launched their investigation earlier independent of China's claims.

Being skeptical is necessary when considering China's terrible past track record. The SARS epidemic also started with a denial and cover-up by China.

There are many other news sources apart from Taiwan News. You can check out the FT. You can check out Reuters. (Decrying Taiwan News as comprising of anti-Chinese nationalists is rather strange considering the CCP's stance against Taiwan)

https://archive.is/nqiKV https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-taiwan...

Please note that even in Feb, the WHO chief was saying travel bans. are not needed https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...

"The head of the World Health Organization said on Monday there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China, and he lauded China’s efforts to contain it." (real figure as we learnt later was already >10x by that time)

“It’s no reason to really panic now,” he said. “The chances of getting this going to anywhere outside China is very low, and even in China, when you go to other provinces, it’s very low.”

"The WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks"

>>lenkit+(OP)
Taiwan's "warnings" were redundant information already provided by PRC - they had no unique observations. Their first case of covid was imported on Jan 21st. They didn't know shit about epidemiological characteristics of virus outside of what was communicated between medical professionals until then. Even Taiwanese media thought H2H chance was low mid January, and Taiwanese CDC didn't believe evidence for H2H was possible to establish until after mid Jan. Any notion that Taiwan had anything useful to warn about in December is part of a _literal_ propaganda drive coordinated by Taiwan and Pompeo's State Department in late March / early April.

https://archive.is/2AdyB

https://apnews.com/article/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556

China cracked down harshly and sufficiently that countries that immediately listened to WHOs advice to test/trace/isolate managed to contain the virus well because very few cases ever made it abroad as seen in import cases statistics from many countries. Expatriation flights meant leakage was inevitable, but screening procedures were mostly theatre, temperature checks instead of 14day quarantines. The problem is very few countries listened to WHO's advice, and still don't.