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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

The WHO and Chinese telling people in mid January that it wasn’t person-to-person transmissible should probably take some serious blame. Taiwan warned the WHO on Dec 31, and the WHO ignored them. The WHO and Chinese obfuscation and downright deceit should not be ignored. The Taiwanese know better.

Of course, there is also the question of Sweden..

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Taiwan did not warn the WHO. Go read the actual letter, it was verbatim of what was released by China.

Go read the WHO press release again. It literally said "no evidence of human to human transmission" at the time. It did not say "NO HUMAN TO HUMAN TRANSMISSION." Stop spreading FUD.

In the December 31 2019 email, Taiwan specifically references seven cases of “atypical pneumonia” as well as mentioning it was not found to be SARS (and by implication that it may be something else).

Taiwan’s position is that by making it clear the new diaease was an was “atypical pneumonia”, it could reasonably be inferred that human to human transmission was likely.

The WHO claiming “no evidence” after this was pointed out to them is the issue - there was some evidence, even if it wasn’t conclusive.

Taiwan’s statement is here: https://www.cdc.gov.tw/Category/ListContent/sOn2_m9QgxKqhZ7o...

This is the actual email, it does not mention human to human transmission.

> "News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us. Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."

https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202004110004

Remember, when WHO says, “no evidence,” it means there is currently no scientific evidence to prove it, not that it can’t happen. Anecdotes are not evidence.

I agree it does not use the words “human to human transmission”.

At the same time, Taiwan claims that by calling it “atypical pneumonia” there was an inference that human to human transmission was possible, or even likely, and so as a result the claim of “no evidence” by the WHO was overstated.

Taiwan is likely also overstating their case. That being said, if the exact same information was passed to the WHO from, say, Germany, it is quite likely it would have been taken with more seriousness.

Taiwan being excluded from the WHO to placate China is a bad thing if your primary focus is world health. Politics should play no part.

Bluntly, Taiwan lied as part of a coordinated propaganda campaign by US and Taiwan [1] [2]. This was around the time western media articles started spinning up revisionist Taiwan WHO stories. Nevermind, it's literally impossible for Taiwan to know epidemiological characteristics of covid19 on Dec31 when their first imported case was on Jan21. It's propaganda, not even good one since it assumes time travel.

Taiwan's email is basically what Chinese CDC reported to publicly [3] and to WHO [4] verbatim, note date and content - SARs like viral pneumonia treated in isolation which is standard practice. They provided zero addition information and tried to swing it as new information retroactively to manipulate public opinion. Taiwan's own CDC deputy director of disease control quoted in early January that H2H could not be determined until new cases are confirmed after Jan14 [5].

[1] https://apnews.com/a0b22f45f0cbc8e83e7d496dd2e09556

[2] https://www.state.gov/virtual-forum-on-expanding-taiwans-par...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia/ch...

[4] https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk...

[5] https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202001060113.aspx

But I feel like there's an equivocation on "determined" here. Taiwan was screening passengers from Wuhan from the beginning of January; even if they didn't know human to human transmission occurred, they clearly thought it was a good thing to presume.

I think any sensible epidemiology response would presume H2H to be possible if the unknown viral pneumonia is compared to SARS. The fact is Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore response are all inline with WHO recommendations to screen, test, trace and isolate on Jan23. Early Jan screening, pre testkit, was basically temperature checks that is insufficient given asymptomatic transmission. Most East Asian countries did this as well, but in retrospect it was essentially security theater. The only deviation in response was early travel bans to China (initially only to Hubei) but this was also AFTER Hubei lockdown which was a pretty clear broadcast that the situation was serious. I would argue also unnecessary since imported cases statistics from these countries (and others) demonstrate covid19 never spread much in China. For example, Taiwan repatriation ~1000 out of Wuhan with 1 positive test. At the end of the day, countries that took prompt actions based off WHO recommendations did well and without massive civic disruptions. The countries that waited too long suffered.

This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.

I thought their statement was that there was 'no evidence' of human transmission (which I believe there wasn't at the time), rather than a definitive statement that there wasn't human transmission.

I could be wrong, there's a lot of information out there and I'm not keeping up

They said there was no evidence, but to a lot of people, "no evidence of" is basically the same thing as saying it "it doesn't transmit human to human". At least to me, saying "we don't know if it transmits human to human" seems more clear. "There is no evidence" to me implies that they checked and didn't find any evidence, not that they hadn't had a chance to look over the available information.

It'd be like if I said that "there is currently no evidence of global warming", just because I personally hadn't looked over the information.

I agree with you that it's terrible choice of wording for a general audience.

Sweden has >10% deaths out of total cases. They handled it quite irresponsibly compared to Denmark.

WHO leadership should really resign after this major screw up.

That's not a comparable number since number of cases depends on how many are tested. For example, Denmark have drive through testing centers, Sweden doesn't.

I never said the number of cases in SE vs. DK was comparable. I said the cases to deaths ratio was very high in SE. Lack of testing only further proves my point.

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