Did China Get It Right? It’s Fair to Ask

There was no shortage of errors in — or criticism toward — China’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak. The country’s handling of it now warrants a reassessment as the rest of the world struggles to contain the pandemic.

Initially, and absolutely critically, information was held back. Authorities knew of the novel coronavirus as early as Nov. 17. The World Health Organization reported the first confirmed case in China was on Dec. 8 based on information received from China. Questions were raised for weeks on how forthcoming China was being. On Feb. 13, the number of new reported cases in Wuhan, the epicenter, suddenly rose 10-fold. Amnesty International, among many others, has said that suppressing information delayed the response.

And that response was criticized as draconian and harsh. Beijing locked down large swathes of territory and the vast transportation network, curtailing the movement of its people, in some cases even to hospitals. At the peak, confinement measures affected close to 500 million people.

Yet, from what we can see now, the spread of the disease slowed once tight controls were introduced. In the early days of the Wuhan lockdown, the number of people that each infected person passed the virus on to dropped to 1.05 from 2.35, studies show. Had China not imposed such steps, one simulation suggests there could have been 8 million cases by February. In contrast, now, there are 80,894 confirmed cases in China.

Data are key to understanding the disease and its spread. Whatever the reservations about accuracy, China is the source of much of what the world has to work with. Chinese scientists sequenced the virus genome and shared it fairly early on. If it wasn’t for the clinical data out of China initially and even now, we wouldn’t know a comforting statistic: 80% of infected people won’t need medical intervention. Nor would we know the incubation period (symptoms start appearing in 11.5 days for most infected people), or the effectiveness of cross-border travel restrictions.

Some parts of China managed better than others, a source of comparison that is useful. For everything Wuhan may have gotten wrong at the start, Shanghai and Zhejiang got right. Their responses were proactive and cases were slow to rise. Even Wuhan’s errors allowed the world a sobering look at emergency mobilization — 31 medical teams, including thousands of doctors and nurses, were sent there.

Beijing took significant risks, backed by billions of dollars. It closed factories and effectively shut down the economy. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts said that the net result is “a hit to the Chinese economy that is likely to be unprecedented in modern times.” Getting the factory floor of the world back to work is a gargantuan effort. But companies like Apple Inc. and Nike Inc., that have since shut stores in other parts of the world have been able to reopen China.