Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Looks like President Trump was right about China lying about Covid cases. According to leaked documents revealed by CNN, China grossly underreported the scale of the Covid outbreak in Mainland China.

The Wuhan files

Leaked documents reveal China’s mishandling of the early stages of Covid-19

Exclusive by Nick Paton Walsh, CNN

Updated 0839 GMT (1639 HKT) December 1, 2020

London — A group of frontline medical workers, likely exhausted, stand huddled together on a video-conference call as China’s most powerful man raises his hand in greeting. It is February 10 in Beijing and President Xi Jinping, who for weeks has been absent from public view, is addressing hospital staff in the city of Wuhan as they battle to contain the spread of a still officially unnamed novel coronavirus.From a secure room about 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) from the epicenter, Xi expressed his condolences to those who have died in the outbreak. He urged greater public communication, as around the world concerns mounted about the potential threat posed by the new disease.That same day, Chinese authorities reported 2,478 new confirmed cases — raising the total global number to more than 40,000, with fewer than 400 cases occurring outside of mainland China. Yet CNN can now reveal how official documents circulated internally show that this was only part of the picture.CNN’s key findings

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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Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/30/asia/wuhan-china-covid-intl/index.html

Meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party is desperately trying to distract attention from their catastrophic mismanagement of the Covid outbreak; their persecution of whistleblowers, callous disregard for other nations and authoritarian coverups.

Now they are trying to claim Australia is the source of the Wuhan Covid-19 outbreak.

China claims coronavirus may have started in AUSTRALIA and travelled to Wuhan’s wet market via frozen steak exports – and attacks US alliance with insulting new cartoon

• Beijing officials and media are pushing theory coronavirus did not start in China 
• An article in state-controlled Global Times said it was imported on frozen food 
• Article said countries including Australia exported food to Wuhan wet market 
• Western scientists say the theory is ‘highly speculative’ and unlikely to be true 

By CHARLIE MOORE, POLITICAL REPORTER FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA

PUBLISHED: 11:31 AEDT, 7 December 2020 | UPDATED: 14:02 AEDT, 7 December 2020

Beijing has claimed that coronavirus may have spawned outside China and travelled to a wet market in Wuhan via frozen food exports from countries including Australia.

An article in the government-controlled Global Times newspaper on Sunday said the idea the virus was imported into the Huanan wet market last year ‘cannot be ruled out’ – although it admitted there is no supporting evidence.

Beijing has been pushing the theory since October when experts tracing an outbreak in Qingdao city found living coronavirus samples on packets of imported frozen cod.  

Western scientists say the theory is ‘highly speculative’ and believe it is much more likely that the disease first passed from animals to humans in the Wuhan area. 

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Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9024311/China-claims-coronavirus-started-AUSTRALIA.html

China’s increasingly absurd quest for someone else to blame, and ongoing failure to come clean on their internal Covid problems, demonstrates they have learned nothing and done nothing to address the flaws in their system of government which created this catastrophe.

This is not the first time the Chinese communist coverups of disease outbreaks have led to unnecessary deaths. In 2003 China confessed to covering up a major SARS outbreak. SARS is a close relative of Covid-19.

China confesses to SARS cover-up

April 21, 2003 — 10.00am

Beijing: The Chinese leadership has taken dramatic action to end a cover-up of the SARS epidemic by revealing 14 new deaths and hundreds of cases, sacking two senior officials and cancelling May Day holidays as the worldwide deathtoll climbed to 204.

The move followed international criticism of China’s handling of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

It also came as Hong Kong announced seven new deaths from the disease.

Singapore, with 14 recorded SARS deaths, took the drastic step of ordering 2,400 people to quarantine themselves at home for 10 days because they might have come into contact with a SARS sufferer at a market.

In a statement on Sunday the Chinese health ministry said there were 346 confirmed cases and 402 suspected cases in Beijing alone, and that 18 people had died from SARS in the capital.

The number of cases in Beijing is nine times higher than the previous official figure of 44 cases and four deaths. The nationwide death toll from SARS has been raised to 79 with 1,814 confirmed cases of the illness.

Shortly after the statement state media reported that Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and Beijing mayor Meng Xuenong were removed from senior positions in the Communist Party, a formal step which will almost certainly see them fired from their government posts.

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Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/national/china-confesses-to-sars-cover-up-20030421-gdgmyx.html

Why does this keep happening?

The fundamental problem, in my opinion, is Communists are no good at communicating bad news to the boss. From the Soviet Chernobyl disaster to SARS in 2003, and now to Covid-19, again and again we have seen an utter failure to act rationally, and decision paralysis in the face of unexpected events, until the problem is so severe it can no longer be concealed. With no free press to smooth the flow of information, it often takes way too long for seriously bad news to filter through to the real decision makers. When the information does get through, decision makers act in their own personal best interests, often with a callous disregard for the safety of other nations.

This structural Chinese Communist incompetence, with their endemic aversion to releasing bad news, even to their own superiors, and with their serial track record of concealing disease outbreaks instead of trying to contain them, in my opinion is an ongoing threat both to their own people and to the rest of the world.

Next time the ChiComs cover up a disease outbreak, and there will be a next time, the disease which finally emerges could be far worse than Covid-19 or SARS.

via Watts Up With That?

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December 7, 2020 at 12:39AM