China’s Mishandling of the Early Stages of COVID-19 Revealed in Leaked Documents!

How would you feel if the majority of the information that we were first given to prepare for this deadly pandemic to hit the United States was falsified? Well, I hate to break it to you but I have some unfortunate news.

“The Wuhan Files” is a 117-page series of confidential documents revealing that Chinese authorities downplayed their statistics on confirmed cases and failed to take proper precautions to prepare for the outbreak of this virus.

These files were provided by a whistleblower who chose to remain anonymous.  All that is known about them is that they worked inside the Chinese healthcare system and felt obligated to expose the lies being fed to the world. According to a CNN article, to determine their authenticity, officials had these documents verified by six independent experts and they were confirmed to be legitimate.

From the beginning, China misrepresented their numbers and the world received more optimistic data than reality. They limited their data with strict criteria, which lead to misleading figures. Chinese officials failed to include the “clinically diagnosed” patients in their public statements which left out the number of seriously ill patients who had been diagnosed by doctors. They did include their “suspected cases,” but it was said by Yanzhong Huang, from the Council of Foreign Relations that a lot of the suspected cases should have been included with the confirmed cases and that the numbers they were giving out were conservative and inaccurate. Huang was also one of the people who reviewed the documents and found them to be authentic. The severity of this situation is shown in a CNN report: on February 10th Hubei officials reported only two-thirds of new cases. The public was told that there was a total of 3,911 new COVID-19 cases, but it was discovered in the Wuhan Files that the real number of new cases was 5,918.

Furthermore, the inaccuracy of these tests, especially in the early stages of the spread, was immense. The Wuhan Files described that the SARS testing kits that were being used to diagnose COVID-19 were ineffective and would regularly give false negatives. Even worse was the fact that the average time it took to confirm a patient experiencing symptoms to being officially diagnosed was 23.3 days. An insightful message from Dr. Amesh Adalja in an interview with CNN reads as follows: “You’re looking at data that’s three weeks old and trying to make a decision for today”. It was also found that there was a huge lack of preparedness that was reflected in these documents. According to CNN’s Key Findings there was a history of underfunding, understaffing, and poor morale/bureaucratic models of governance which hampered China’s early warning system.

A Williamsburg area medical professional who requested to remain anonymous stated, “These files should have been discovered a long, long time ago.” and she asked the same pressing question that we are all thinking: “Where would we be now it they had been discovered earlier?”

Finding these documents earlier may not have prevented the spread of COVID-19 and its evolution into a global pandemic, but it definitely could have helped us to be more prepared for what was to come. The real question is: why? Why did China feel the need to lie about their statistics? Were they embarrassed? Or did they have a larger plan of action in mind…..