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throwaway122378

On 1/24/20 the WHO said there’s no human to human transmission of covid-19

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=20

They are to blame as much as anyone else

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WHO isn't faultless, but that's a fairly misrepresentative version of what that Tweet actually says..

"WHO said there's no human to human transmission" vs.

> Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.

Agreed. They surely share in the blame but then again, it's not as if China is our ally who we can count on to give accurate and timely information. They (and others) would love nothing more than to see the US crumble and burn. So I understand some of the WHO (and CDC) skepticism in the early days. Not that I'm defending their later actions (or lack thereof).

It was 1/23/20. Wuhan was under lockdown but there was no clear evidence of human to human transfer? Cmon

That tweet was from ten days before the lockdown, based on evidence gathered prior to that. The first death from the disease was 3 days prior to the WHO tweet and Chinese researchers had only identified the specific virus 6 days prior:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...

That very same day the WHO was recommending handwashing / avoiding close contact with anyone with flu-like symptoms / and avoiding wet markets and close contact with animals (since the largest known source of infection was the market in Wuhan):

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1216754859292184577

It's hard to lay any blame on the WHO for not taking the virus seriously enough in the first days of the outbreak when major politicians were still dismissing it two months later.

Your source for that is China itself?

WHO deserves a ton of blame. For one, they refused to call it a pandemic and actually pressured experts who disagreed to take back what they said and then called it a Pandemic the very next day. https://twitter.com/RizaHawkeye8/status/1241415090097684480

Um, I've not been watching the WHO that closely, but didn't they state clearly their definition of a pandemic, and say [not a direct quote] "it's not yet a pandemic but might well become one", and then when it did pass their definition they called it a pandemic.

Seems reasonable, forthright, and scientific.

What did you want instead? Every epidemic to be called a pandemic?

It was obvious to many experts (see tweet for one example) that it was a pandemic. These experts were frustrated that WHO was not recognizing it as one.

My opinion is that WHO should have called it pandemic much earlier and raised the alarm much earlier.

They said there is no evidence of it, that's completely different from what you wrote.

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