On the first anniversary of the outbreak of coronavirus, so to speak, the panel of experts commissioned by the World Health Organisation has few bouquets to offer either to the UN entity or to China for their failure to act speedily enough in the wake of the dreadful outbreak of Covid-19.

The panel, headed by the former President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark, has advanced the very pertinent point that the UN’s health agency should have labelled the virus as a pandemic sooner than it did. In the event, opportunities to apply what the medical fraternity would call “basic public measures at the earliest opportunity” were lost almost the world over. Indeed, China, where the virus germinated in Wuhan last January ~ if not earlier ~ ought to have applied its efforts more forcefully shortly after Covid-19 afflicted more and more people. As often as not, the global crisis has been attributed to China, and not without reason.

The panel has now underscored the grim reality ~ “Only a minority of countries took full advantage of the information that was available to respond to the evidence of a pandemic”. The experts also wondered why WHO did not declare a global health emergency sooner than it did. After the relentless suffering for a year, WHO has conceded that its committee was divided on whether a “global emergency” should be declared. Perhaps it would be no exagerration to suggest that the UN’s World Health Organisation has failed the world, judging by the vital parameter of global health, intrinsically an index of public policy. There were other failures too; for instance, WHO initially declared air travel safe and then reversed itself on the use of face masks.

The panel has posed the very pertinent query as to whether it would have helped if WHO had used the expression, “pandemic” earlier than it did. The UN entity did not refer to the outbreak as a “pandemic” until March 11, i.e. several weeks after the virus had caused what the committee has called “explosive outbreaks” in almost every continent. WHO’s experts had even disputed how infectious the virus could be, claiming that it was not as contagious as flu and that people without symptoms only rarely spread the virus.

Scientists have concluded that the virus transmits even faster than the flu and that a significant percentage of the spread “is from people who don’t appear to be sick”. This echoes the finding that while China has been lauded in public, officials there have privately complained that the government has been loath to share critical information on the dreaded disease. The global controversy over the origins and prognosis of coronavirus persists after a year.