Coronavirus Numbers From China “Suspicious,” Says Brown University Expert
Saturday, February 08, 2020
Brown University Professor Katherine Mason said “it’s pretty clear anyone who has followed China and public health will be quite suspicious of the numbers” being reported for the latest Coronavirus, in an appearance on GoLocal LIVE on Friday.
Mason is the author of "Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic," which was based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China following the 2003 SARS epidemic.
Across mainland China, there were 3,399 new confirmed infections on Friday, bringing the total accumulated number so far to 34,546, the country’s National Health Commission said on Saturday, according to Reuters, with the death toll pushing past 700.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST“To even count right now, so in Wuhan, anyone who is not in very, very dire straits is being turned away, so you’re only really counting those severe cases, so I think probably the true number of cases is a lot higher,” she said. “The true number of deaths is probably [only] somewhat higher, but I think those two things are probably not proportionate to each other.”
Mason spoke to what she believed were the lessons learned by the Chinese government from the 2003 SARS epidemic — and what was not learned.
“They learned a lot, but maybe not what some people would hope they would have learned,” said Mason. “What they learned is that they do not ever want to be responsible again for an epidemic like SARS. In the intervening years, [China] put a huge amount of investment and effort and durability in their public health system, and they rebuilt in a very particular way -- it was built precisely to try and be organized around identifying and reporting new viruses like SARS.”
“I think the problem with that is people have an overinflated sense of just how powerful the central government is in the areas of public health,” said Mason. “So certainly they’re showing their power now in the terms of their ability to enact mass quarantines and shut down the whole country basically — which is not something we could ever do here — however, they don’t have a lot of control over the production and sharing of information at the local level. China is so big, frankly, that it’s not really possible for them to know what’s happening all the time everywhere as much as people might think that they can.”
Issues with Reporting — and Transparency
“So they very much rely on local health officials to perform the surveillance and then report it back up through the system they had developed precisely in response to SARS. The problem is there are a lot of disincentives at the local level for doing that and from my point of view, quite predictably the local officials did not do that,” said Mason.
She spoke to the growing outrage over the death of whistleblower Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded by the Chinese government for alerting the public to the potential crisis — before he died this week of the new coronavirus.
“The reason he got in a lot of trouble for that is that it is illegal to report on novel viruses directly to the public — it’s actually a state secret finding out that there is a new virus. It is officially considered a state secret in China. So what that means is you are supposed to report to your supervisor, who’s then supposed to report it up, and then at the provincial or central level that’s where they will decide whether to release the information to the public,” said Mason.
“He went public without following procedure and that’s why he got in quite a bit of hot water with authorities. Now they had to back down because of popular opinion about this, but now that he has passed I think it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens because people are extremely angry and upset.”
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