"We now know the virus is, and always was, extraordinarily contagious.By suppressing that information for weeks, China robbed the rest of the world of time it could have used to prepare for the pandemic.“The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected, because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain,” Dr Deborah Birx, the immunologist currently serving as the White House’s coronavirus response co-ordinator, said this week.Put more simply, China’s deception led other nations to make false assumptions about the virus, which left them more vulnerable to the pandemic."
