| I'm looking at the timeline on wikipedia, and it looks like you should be saying 'January' instead of 'December': Dec 30: The Wuhan Municipal Health Committee reported to the WHO that 27 people had been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown cause. Dec 31: China contacts the WHO and informs them of "cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan". Jan 4: The WHO waited for China to release information about the "mysterious new pneumonia virus".[51] The United Nations agency activated its incident-management system at the country, regional and global level and was standing ready to launch a broader response if it was needed. Jan 9: The WHO confirmed that the novel coronavirus had been isolated from one person who had been hospitalised. The WHO also reported that Chinese authorities had acted swiftly, identifying the novel coronavirus within weeks of the onset of the outbreak, with the total number of positively tested people being 41. The first death from the virus occurred in a 61-year-old man who was a regular customer at the market. Jan 14: Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO's emerging diseases unit said that there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus, mainly small clusters in families, adding that "it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission" Jan 20: After two medical staff were infected in Guangdong, China announced that the virus was human-to-human transmissible … the WHO has said [it] is deeply concerning and could signal evidence of a much larger outbreak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932... China probably could have informed people earlier, but it seems easier to not tell the WHO than to pressure the WHO to keep a secret. Also, there's a difference between possible human-to-human and confirmed human-to-human transmission. |