I'm not defending what they did, but let's make the facts clear.
Initially (december?) they denied there was human-human transmission, and tried to down play magnitude of the virus.
And once Wuhan was locked down, they down played how harsh it was, cut out the media (with the excuse of not causing panic).
But even before Wuhan locked down, they allowed the release of the virus sequence (Jan 2020), their mitigation efforts in Wuhan (the field hospitals built there, the thousands of doctors sent there, the treatment strategy the doctors used, what worked, what didn't), the air borne transmission, treatment methods, and all of that.
I was following this pretty closely, and the Chinese released very relevant information very early on.
But when Italy got hit, it was like they didn't even bother listening to anything the Chinese already put out. The Italians re-discovered pronation, low oxygen flow intubation, anti blood clot medication, etc.
Blaming the Chinese health authorities for not being credible is fine. But simply discounting everything they said is stupid. And completely ignoring their information even with mounting other evidence because "The Chinese are not credible", is doubly stupid.
It's like the world put on stupid blinders, and just wished that the Chinese were lying and Covid would just disappear magically.
I don't suggest ignoring everything the Chinese health authorities said, that would be ridiculous. "Take everything China allows to be released to the West with a pinch of salt" is a sensible starting point though - you can use it as an input, but you have to be more skeptical of information fed to you by a communist-controlled authority than you would otherwise be, and you certainly don't add credibility by pointing out "the Chinese authorities said so".
My point is that even the "untrustable Chinese" were saying airborne transmission at the outset. And other evidence that they were right came pouring in from other countries like Korea, Hong Kong, Italy, etc right from the start.
The CDC and WHO's decision to deny airborne transmission 14 months into the pandemic is purely idiotic.
So who do I trust now? Independent Scientists. Basically Twitter, ffs.
Initially (december?) they denied there was human-human transmission, and tried to down play magnitude of the virus.
And once Wuhan was locked down, they down played how harsh it was, cut out the media (with the excuse of not causing panic).
But even before Wuhan locked down, they allowed the release of the virus sequence (Jan 2020), their mitigation efforts in Wuhan (the field hospitals built there, the thousands of doctors sent there, the treatment strategy the doctors used, what worked, what didn't), the air borne transmission, treatment methods, and all of that.
I was following this pretty closely, and the Chinese released very relevant information very early on.
But when Italy got hit, it was like they didn't even bother listening to anything the Chinese already put out. The Italians re-discovered pronation, low oxygen flow intubation, anti blood clot medication, etc.
Blaming the Chinese health authorities for not being credible is fine. But simply discounting everything they said is stupid. And completely ignoring their information even with mounting other evidence because "The Chinese are not credible", is doubly stupid.
It's like the world put on stupid blinders, and just wished that the Chinese were lying and Covid would just disappear magically.