Foreign journalists should not travel to the Chinese city that spawned a coronavirus outbreak, according to a senior diplomat in Beijing.
“The Wuhan government called on people outside Wuhan not to visit the city in the near future,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters this week. “We hope foreign journalists in China can apprehend what is happening in Wuhan, understand the prevention and control measures taken, and heed the advice from local authorities. This is for their own good.”
Chinese authorities are struggling to contain an outbreak that has killed 17 people and sickened hundreds of others, including one prominent respiratory specialist who believes he caught the infection through his left eyeball. Chinese authorities have quarantined the city of 11 million, but the sickness has reached as far as the United States, eliciting accusations of a government cover-up.
“The Chinese Communist Party has once again been caught red-handed covering up, suppressing, and censoring a serious public health risk, which could increasingly be a global public health risk,” Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and outspoken China hawk, said during a Wednesday radio interview. “For weeks, China did not come clean about the coronavirus that they first said was only being passed from animals to humans in a seafood market in Wuhan in China.”
Geng said that China has been “acting with openness, transparency, and a high sense of responsibility to global health security” throughout the crisis. “Of course, I understand that some foreign journalists are already in Wuhan for reporting,” he said. “They should listen to the suggestions from local authorities, take preventive health measures, and avoid cross infection.”
A man in Washington state was confirmed to have the virus on Tuesday, but local authorities credited him with acting quickly to seek treatment and minimize the risk of spreading the sickness. Other cases have been detected in Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan.
“Though it is not a public emergency, it may yet become one,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday. “The outbreak is very high-risk in China, and high-risk regionally and globally.”
Local political analysts blamed the response on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power in recent years.
“All these campaigns that have been launched one after another since Xi Jinping came to power seven years ago have robbed cadres of the motivation to take the initiative, and they have become accustomed to hiding behind the shadow of the strong man,” Wu Qiang, a former professor in Beijing, said this week.
Xi ordered that the virus “be taken seriously” on Monday, more than three weeks after the first case was detected on Dec. 31. “Who would dare to take on this responsibility without knowing whatever action to be taken would enjoy Xi’s blessings?” Steve Tsang, a China expert at the University of London, told a reporter. “All important and sensitive issues will have to be decided by the top leader.”
Xi’s belated directive drew a backhanded compliment from a senior State Department official who recalled that China was “slow to respond out of fear of embarrassment” to the SARS epidemic in 2003 but credited the Communist government for getting more transparent with the WHO.
“That reluctance to respond in a rapid manner again … doesn’t give the global community a secure feeling for this being managed inside China,” the official said on Wednesday. “I’m starting to see something today in the Chinese press that says they’re going to start trying to control movement and all those things until they can isolate it. Kudos for sharing the genome or whatever that is so the CDC and the WHO can look at those things.”
