The Trump administration has tried to blame China for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
U.S. agencies have invested some efforts to obtain documents from China that might provide proof for that.
At least some of those documents were now leaked to CNN which has published them as The Wuhan Files.
But the documents do not show any malfeasance from China's side. They do show a health system and bureaucracy under stress while they have trouble to get an outbreak of a previously unknown infectious disease under control.
This is the most incriminating issue CNN could find in the papers:
In a report marked "internal document, please keep confidential," local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories. This larger figure was never fully revealed at that time, as China's accounting system seemed, in the tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the outbreak.
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The Chinese government has steadfastly rejected accusations made by the United States and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed information relating to the virus, maintaining that it has been upfront since the beginning of the outbreak. However, though the documents provide no evidence of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate findings, they do reveal numerous inconsistencies in what authorities believed to be happening and what was revealed to the public.
Further down in the piece it becomes clear that the differences in reporting case numbers and the 'numerous inconsistencies' were based on the use of multiple categories:
On February 10, when China reported 2,478 new confirmed cases nationwide, the documents show Hubei actually circulated a different total of 5,918 newly reported cases. The internal number is divided into subcategories, providing an insight into the full scope of Hubei's diagnosis methodology at the time.
"Confirmed cases" number 2,345, "clinically diagnosed cases" 1,772, and "suspected cases" 1,796.
So China's central health service reported 2,478 confirmed cases for all of China while Hubei province reported 2,345 confirmed cases. How is that supposed to be a significant difference?
In early February China still had problems to sufficiently test for Covid-19 infections. It took time to confirm new cases. The tests were also not yet reliable. The category 'clinical diagnosed cases' was for those who had tested negative with a still faulty test but showed signs of acute pneumonia – i.e. 'ground-glass opacity' on CT chest scans. After the testing problems were resolved the category was eliminated:
Chinese officials did soon improve the reporting system, placing the "clinically diagnosed" cases into the "confirmed" category by mid-February.
Further down the CNN writers admit that the documents they were given do not show that China did anything wrong:
However, Mertha, the JHU academic, said the mismatch between the higher internal and lower public figures on the February death toll "appeared to be a deception, for unsurprising reasons."
"China had an image to protect internationally, and lower-ranking officials had a clear incentive to under-report — or to show their superiors that they were under-reporting — to outside eyes," he said.
Conversely, however, the leaked documents also provide something of a defense of China's overall handling of the virus. The reports show that in the early stages of the pandemic, China faced the same problems of accounting, testing, and diagnosis that still haunt many Western democracies even now — issues compounded by Hubei encountering an entirely new virus.
Similarly, no mention is made by officials of a so-called laboratory leak, or that the virus was man-made, as some critics, including top US officials, have claimed without evidence.
As the Department of Fear snarks:
U.S. Dept. of Fear @FearDept – 16:55 UTC · Dec 1, 2020
Documents leaked to CNN reveal that China took weeks to get its shit together and eradicate COVID from its soil.
(Nobody has bothered to leak our situation because it's perfectly clear the whole year has been a shit-show and the worst is yet to come.)
Indeed, China did so much 'wrong' that it no longer has a Covid-19 problem.
There is one interesting detail in the files the CNN was given that might become relevant during the ongoing search for the origin of the epidemic:
Tuesday, December 1, marks one year since the first known patient showed symptoms of the disease in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan, according to a key study in the Lancet medical journal.
At the same time that the virus is believed to have first emerged, the documents show another health crisis was unfolding: Hubei was dealing with a significant influenza outbreak. It caused cases to rise to 20 times the level recorded the previous year, the documents show, placing enormous levels of additional stress on an already stretched health care system.
The influenza "epidemic," as officials noted in the document, was not only present in Wuhan in December, but was greatest in the neighboring cities of Yichang and Xianning. It remains unclear what impact or connection the influenza spike had on the Covid-19 outbreak.
There is no proof that the very first SARS-CoV-2 infection of a human being has actually taken place in China. SARS-CoV-2 infections have been retroactively found in France and Italy in blood samples that were taken in November 2019 or earlier. The influenza outbreak in Hubei province may have silently reinforced the spreading of SARS-CoV-2 in China. It could explain why Hubei was the first place where a Covid-19 outbreak was noticed while it was spreading silently elsewhere.
The 'blame China' game will continue independent of what the evidence says. But it is becoming harder and harder to argue that the mess most 'western' countries are in was caused by China when it is so obvious that it is caused by the behaviors of our own societies.