This is the first part of a major Financial Times series, Coronavirus: could the world have been spared?, investigating the global response to the crisis and whether the disaster could have been averted.
The FT has spoken to dozens of medical professionals, government officials and ordinary citizens in Wuhan to find out what really happened in the first weeks of the outbreak.
During the investigation, some of the people approached were threatened by police, who said that the FT had come to the city with “malicious intent”. Police harassment of virus victims, their relatives and anyone hoping to speak to them is continuing, raising doubts about whether Xi Jinping’s administration is really willing to facilitate the impartial investigation into the pandemic that it has promised the world. Read more…..

Chart of the Day
Icarus TV
The global health community has learned some valuable lessons from watching how China handled the COVID-19 outbreak in the early days.