Reports of a coverup, as COVID-19 spreads globally
The China Project illustration by Derek Zheng
On Monday, March 2, the World Health Organization said that “the number of new cases outside China was almost 9 times higher than that inside the country over the [previous] 24 hours,” according to CNBC.
Two independent Chinese media outlets published investigative reports last week pointing to a cover-up — or at best a mess-up — in Wuhan, which delayed reporting of the emerging coronavirus outbreak to China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), wasting valuable weeks in the early days of the epidemic. (Click here for more on China’s struggling but still-not-dead crew of news outlets that try to report real news.)
Even though the total death toll has passed 3,000 (most of them in China), the official number of new cases of COVID-19 in China has slowed to a trickle outside of Hubei Province, and Chinese government messaging continues to signal that the crisis has peaked in China. Click here for the latest statistics on reported infections, deaths, and recovered patients broken down by country, with Chinese provinces listed separately.
Zhejiang Province “downgraded its alert status” today, after becoming one of the first regions to declare an emergency over the outbreak weeks ago, SCMP reports, while preventing contagion between countries is now a focus of Beijing.
China’s epidemic-enabled surveillance state expansion continues: An Alibaba-made app is now being widely used to automatically sort citizens into categories, some of which bar them from passing through transportation checkpoints, per the New York Times. See also this opinion piece from The China Project editor-in-chief Jeremy Goldkorn: The coming biosecurity state.
