The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said there were “lost opportunities” in the early stages of the outbreak when basic public health measures should have been put in place at the earliest opportunity.
“While still collecting information, the panel is becoming more confident in its understanding of the early events in Wuhan, China, where the first presently known cluster of cases was identified,” it said.
“What is clear to the panel is that public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January.”
The report also finds fault with other countries for being too slow to respond when there was evidence of COVID-19 cases in a number of countries by the end of January last year.
“Public health containment measures should have been implemented immediately in any country with a likely case. They were not,” it said.
“According to the information analysed by the panel, the reality is that only a minority of countries took full advantage of the information available to them to respond to the evidence of an emerging epidemic.”
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Information could have been shared “more widely and proactively” between countries, and authorities should have taken faster action to deploy containment measures whenever cases appeared.
The panel highlighted a briefing for the WHO executive board on February 4 that heard of 12,000 confirmed cases in China but only 176 in other countries, saying this was “definitive evidence” of human-to-human transmission.
This was a “clear signal to all countries” with even small numbers of cases that they needed to act quickly contain the spread.
