China's revision of Covid-19 figures
Guillermo Puyana Ramos1
China's adjustment to the figures for victims in Wuhan, which included 1.290 sick people and 325 deaths that had not been registered in January and February, has shown the profound damage that other countries are doing to the fight against COVID-19 due to the manipulation of information.
That was the missing piece in the conspiratorial puzzle promoted by the US government to attack and stop funding the World Health Organization (WHO), under the argument that it had been complacent with China, which it has accused of hiding the truth about the virus outbreak.
Under other circumstances, the news that day would have been that no COVID-19 patients had died in China.
The precise context is that it's normal for countries to adjust their infection and death figures. On April 10, England, a country with 5% of China's population, added 3.486 cases to its infection count. On April 3, the French government had to add 17.827 cases and 884 deaths because these were elderly people in care homes, and France was only reporting cases and deaths in hospitals. New York State said on April 14 that it had omitted 3.778 deaths. None of these cases made headlines.
Adjustments to the data will continue because they are part of the real problem of the pandemic. Countries with low testing capacity, or those that haven't reached the nursing homes where elderly people die and are initially reported as having died from one of the thousands of age-related illnesses, only to later test positive for the virus—as revealed in a CNN report on April 7—are facing challenges. Forensic examiners in the United States aren't receiving test kits to determine if corpses show traces of the virus because they need them for the living, leading to underreporting. Or, in the urgency of the situation, some have simply decided to focus on the hospital network and have forgotten the main victims of COVID-19 in the Western world: those in care homes, neglected by their families and governments. Many factors will cause the figures to be revised repeatedly, and just when the curve seems to plateau, an adjustment will come along, sending the graphs soaring once again.
What is regrettable and worrying is when a case is selected to attack a country, a race, or a multilateral organization. It is far more serious when we see the enormous shadow of politicization through strategic guidelines such as the destruction of the regulated international system: weapons, migration, development, climate change, trade, security, human rights, and education. Health is just another step. During his presidency, Trump abandoned partners like Canada when he left NAFTA, South Korea when he withdrew from KORUS, Australia, and again Canada when he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He left UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Council, the Paris Agreement, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. He threatened to abandon his NATO allies, to leave the World Trade Organization, and not to return to the G7 if Russia—unbelievably—was not readmitted. I repeat, the WHO is just another step.
And we mustn't forget the internal US electoral factors at play in this episode. With his approval ratings plummeting, no defense against his ineptitude in coordinating the fight against the pandemic, and losing ground in the industrial states of the Midwest, Trump desperately needs an enemy, someone to blame. He blamed Ford for the lack of ventilators, Europe for the spread of the pandemic in the United States—all while praising China—and the Democrats for being too busy with his impeachment proceedings to come up with any solutions.
This attack is against the most important instrument of international cooperation to fight in a coordinated way against a global health problem and seeks either to eliminate the WHO to replace it with some organization that answers primarily to the United States, or the resignation of Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, whose vision of global public health is that certain treatments and vaccines should be provided to the poorest countries in the world free of charge, without commercial considerations, a language incomprehensible to Trump and his circle.
It will be a long-term struggle, as the US withdrawal from multilaterally governed institutions did not begin with COVID-19, nor does it involve only China. The current situation is that, in the fight against the pandemic, no country has deployed as much humanitarian assistance as China in all its dimensions—not only materials and equipment, but also experience and knowledge. If China makes a decision so contrary to its international policy of cooperation and decides not to continue, that cooperation and assistance will not come from the countries that would benefit from the spread of hatred and racism at a time when the strength and presence of international organizations and the solidarity of the world's nations are needed more than ever.
1- President of the Colombian-Chinese Friendship Association, writer for various media outlets, and lawyer from the University of the Andes. Article originally published at: http://spanish.chinatoday.com.cn/2018/tj/202004/t20200423_800201838.html
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