Chinese experts affirm country's speed, transparency in virus response

China has always been swift and transparent in dealing with outbreaks of infectious disease, said Wu Zunyou, a chief epidemiology expert from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in response to questioning from some countries about China's information disclosure.

Wu made the remarks at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday.

He said the country demonstrated this principle during the SARS epidemic in 2003 and has adopted it well in the COVID-19 outbreak.

Wu said on Jan 3, when Chinese medical teams still knew nothing about the pathogen that caused the outbreak, they notified the World Health Organization and other countries about the outbreak and called it an "unexplained pneumonia".

"This move showed China had shared all information with the world. Later on January 7, as soon as we figured out the novel coronavirus caused this pneumonia, we notified the WHO and relevant countries," Wu said.

"At the first we clarified the viral gene sequence, uploaded it onto the WHO global data sharing platform for all other countries to produce diagnostic reagents," he said.

Wang Guiqiang, head of the department of infectious diseases at Peking University First Hospital, echoed Wu, saying some countries have highly appreciated China's active sharing and exchanges between experts.

"At the beginning of the outbreak, we mainly shared our experience of prevention and control with parties such as the ASEAN countries, because many countries had no cases then. With the emergence of cases, we gradually began to share methods and experience of diagnosis and treatment especially for severe patients.

"This also received recognition from various countries and regions. For example, the chief expert of Poland spoke highly of our presentations and the chief expert of Latvia, who was then engaged in clinical practice, said the introduction of relevant experiences was useful to him," he said.