This is a big developing story folks
I will present the facts
It is up to you however, to reach your own conclusions.
An independent investigation has found thatCovid-19 tests in China were muffled, as only three relatively “obscure” firms were allowed to test initially
These companies had intimate ties with the chinese CDC, and in fact paid them money before testing.
The tests, as a result were unrelaiable and took a long time to “process”
The response by the Chinese government, to the world, was then significantly delayed, which allowed the Wuhan Virus to sprad unchecked, causing global and financial chaos.
Check it out:
Daily Mail had the story here:
Cronyism, state secrecy and needless bureaucracy may have robbed China of the chance to stop coronavirus before it became a pandemic, an investigation into the country's early testing fiasco has revealed.
Investigators found that just three obscure companies with close ties to officials at China's CDC were initially allowed to make tests to detect the virus, most of which were unreliable and took ages to return results because of a decision to process all of the kits in Beijing.
That meant officials in charge of overseeing the country's response to the pandemic were blinded to the disease's spread because of a lack of accurate testing data.
Meanwhile patients who doctors were sure had the virus were discharged from hospital after testing negative on a faulty kit, and went on to infect others.
For almost two weeks between January 5 and January 17, China officially recorded no new cases of the virus when in fact hundreds were infected, as officials delayed ordering travel bans, bans on gatherings, and city-wide lockdowns.
The Financial Times also had this to say:
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”. Police harassment of virus victims, their relatives and anyone hoping to speak to them is continuing, raising doubts about whether Xi Jinping’s administration is really willing to facilitate the impartial investigation into the pandemic that it has promised the world.
On December 29, Wuhan Central Hospital discovered four patients displaying symptoms of viral pneumonia. All of them had come from a local seafood market © Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty
It was in late December, while scrolling through his Twitter feed, that Gao Fei first noticed chatter about a possible virus outbreak in Wuhan.
Mr Gao, who had grown up near Wuhan, regularly used virtual private network software to hop over the “Great Firewall”, as China’s internet censorship regime is more popularly known, to access banned sites such as Twitter. While government officials and state media were saying very little about the virus, he was determined to learn more.
As doubts about the true size of the outbreak grew through January, Mr Gao, 33, decided to rush home from southern Guangdong province where he was working as a welder. He arrived in his home village, about 120km from Wuhan, on January 21, just a day after the Chinese government finally broke its silence about the epidemic and confirmed the virus was spreading human-to-human.
The Chinese government had formally notified the World Health Organization on January 3 that a “severe pneumonia of unknown etiology” — science speak for a mysterious new respiratory disease — had been discovered in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province with a population of 11m. But 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.
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