When Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, declared late last month that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus was an international public-health emergency, he took pains to commend China for its response to the pathogen. “In many ways, China actually is setting a new standard for outbreak response, and it’s not an exaggeration,” he said. As the new disease, now called COVID-19, grew into a health crisis, Chinese officials had quarantined entire cities in a matter of days, suspended travel, closed schools and businesses, and imposed severe restrictions on who could leave their homes. Local researchers rapidly sequenced and shared the virus’s genome, allowing labs around the world to work on their own diagnostic tools. Authorities built two new “specialized hospitals” in 10 days, footage of which China’s state-owned media pumped out to the world on social media. They leveraged their formidable surveillance powers to scale up contact tracing, an essential measure in stopping an outbreak. President Donald Trump tweeted in praise of China’s “great discipline.”
Even after subsequent reports indicated that the Chinese government’s secrecy and hostility to dissent had helped the outbreak spread, WHO officials have continued to laud Beijing’s response. At a conference in Munich earlier this month, Michael Ryan, the executive director of the organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, maintained that people in China feel protected. “They feel like their government has stepped in aggressively and quickly to protect them,” he said. “That is the ultimate social contract between any government and its people.”