Leaked documents show China bluntly lied about Covid-19 and mishandled early pandemic

Coronavirus was first reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan's Hubei province in China. The deadly virus since then has infected more than 63.2 million people and led to over 1.47 million deaths around the world, according to John Hopkins University coronavirus resource centre.

Also read: Chinese scientists now claim coronavirus originated in India in summer 2019

Many reports in past have proved that China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence related to the coronavirus outbreak. Communist regime endangered other countries by silencing doctors and whistleblowers who spoke about the virus. If this was not enough, Beijing destroyed evidence of it in laboratories and also refused to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.

Also read: International survey shows China has lost international backing after the emergence of COVID-19

According to a report published in CNN, a document marked as "internal document, please keep confidential," local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official the public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories.

A whistleblower, who worked in the Chinese health care system, provided 117 pages of internal documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to CNN. 

The files, which CNN had verified by six experts, showed how the region struggled to manage the coronavirus between October 2019 and April 2020 – a critical time period in which the virus spread from China to cause a worldwide pandemic. 

There are many theories around the origin of the virus, from being leaked of the Wuhan virus Lab to many of them linking it to the wet market in Wuhan.

The reason for the origin of the virus remains unknown, though. Local health authorities initially thought the patients had fallen ill through exposure to common infection source in the market and ruled out the pathogen as contagious until January 20.

The Xi Jinping government has been rejecting 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.

Should China be held accountable for mishandling the deadly virus at the initial stage, it is the answer that the world is looking for.

(With inputs from agencies)