The US has been criticizing China’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak, first identified in Wuhan, Hubei in December 2019, as slow and inadequate in its early stages…
According to the four-page intelligence report, marked “for official use only” but not classified, during a period in January when China was allegedly downplaying the many dangers of the novel respiratory disease, the country had dramatically increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies, including face masks, gloves and surgical gowns.
The analysis claims China sought to cover up its manoeuvres by “denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data”.
The same report suggests that throughout January, Beijing procrastinated in warning the World Health Organisation that COVID-19 “was a contagion” as it hiked up medical supply orders from abroad.
The document, according to The Associated Press, claims its conclusions are based on the finding, arrived at with 95 percent probability, that China’s import and export changes during the stated period were not within the normal range.
China imported 2.5 billion items of personal protective equipment (PPE), including over two billion masks, during the six weeks starting mid-January, according to Chinese government data cited by Newsweek, with the countries that shipped the supplies subsequently hard pressed to assemble enough PPE for their own fight against the disease.
