BEIJING – Chinese authorities declined to provide World Health Organization researchers with raw, personalized data on early Covid-19 cases that could help them determine how and when the coronavirus first started to spread in China, according to WHO researchers who heated exchanges on the defect described of detail.
The Chinese authorities have rejected requests to provide such data on 174 cases of Covid-19 that they identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. The researchers are part of a WHO team that week is completed. a month-long mission in China to discover the origins of the pandemic.
Chinese officials and scientists have provided their own comprehensive summaries and analysis of data on the cases, WHO team members said. They also provided aggregated data and analysis of retrospective medical record searches in the months before the Wuhan outbreak was identified, saying they found no evidence of the virus.
But the WHO team was not allowed to review the raw underlying data from those retrospective studies, allowing them to conduct their own analysis on how early and how extensively the virus started to spread in China, the team members said. Member States typically provide such data – anonymized, but disaggregated so that investigators can see all other relevant details about each case – as part of WHO studies, the team members said.
“They showed us a few examples, but that’s not the same as they all do, which is standard epidemiological research,” said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist on the WHO team. “So, you know, the interpretation of that data becomes more limited from our point of view, although the other side might consider it pretty good.”