Defense Sec. Esper: China still withholding virus information
'We need to do more to press China,' says Secretary of Defense Mark Esper discussing China's cover up of coronavirus data
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Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said on Wednesday that China could have been more “transparent” early on and could have shared more data pertaining to the threat of the coronavirus outbreak, which would have helped develop a “better understanding of the virus."
“Even today, I see them withholding information and I think we need to do more to continue to press them to share,” Esper told “America’s Newsroom.”
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Esper's comments came after The Associated Press reported a story about six crucial days in January in which Chinese officials kept quiet about the outbreak.
In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations
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President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20, but by that time more than 3,000 people had been infected, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.
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That six-day delay, from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20, was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.
But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China’s attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.
Esper said that there needs to be a global “cooperative” effort to fight the coronavirus.
“We all cooperate — all nations around the world need to cooperate to understand this virus and to get it under control and we’re just simply not seeing what we need to see from China right now.”