China on Tuesday defended its early actions taken to fight the COVID-19 outbreak, saying that it immediately notified the World Health Organization (WHO) and took “the most comprehensive, thorough, strict prevention and control measures”.
“Facing the unknown SARS-CoV-2, China immediately notified WHO of the epidemic situation, shared the virus genome sequence at the earliest possible time, and took the most comprehensive, thorough, strict prevention and control measures,” Sun Yang from China’s National Health Commission told WHO’s Executive Board.
The remarks come a day after the independent WHO panel said that Chinese officials could have applied public health measures more forcefully in January last year to curb the spread of the disease.
Some paragraphs in the interim report of the panel headed by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf are “inconsistent with the facts”, Sun said.
It has been a year since the novel coronavirus was discovered in China’s Wuhan province. Currently, over two million people have died from it across the globe. However, 52 million of those infected have recovered from it.
WHO marks one year since COVID-19 outbreak
