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GENEVA- A committee of experts commissioned by the World Health Organization criticized China and other countries for failing to take action to curb the initial coronavirus outbreak sooner, and questioned whether the United Nations health agency should have called it a pandemic before.
In a report released Monday, the committee, led by former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, said that opportunities were “missed to implement basic public health measures as soon as possible” and that the Chinese authorities could have applied their measures “with more force” in January, shortly after the coronavirus began to affect groups of people.
“The reality is that only a minority of countries made the most of the information available to respond to the evidence of an emerging pandemic,” the group said.
The experts also wondered why WHO did not declare a global public health emergency earlier. The agency convened its emergency committee on January 22, but did not qualify what was happening as an international emergency until a week later. At the time, the WHO noted that its expert committee was divided over the statement.
“Yet another question is whether it would have helped if the WHO had used the word pandemic earlier than it did,” the committee added.
The WHO did not describe the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic until March 11, weeks after the virus began to generate sources of contagion on several continents.