"What if China did it X weeks earlier!"-------Talk is easy. It was not you who were in the fog of war by then. If you,
DavidsSling were the leader medical experters team in Wuhan when the disease just broke out. The information you collected was like this:
1, There are not many cases for you to investigate.
2, Most the cases seemed to be related to animals(Wuhan wet market)
3, It was very hard to track all people who had close contact with these limited cases.
4, Those close contact people that had been successfully tracked had not been found infected.
The reasons why human to human infection was not found in early stage are: 1)Based on China's recent statistical data, only
6.3% of all close contact people would be infected. 2) Among the 6.3%, 80% of them have slight cold like symptoms. Or no symptoms at all 3) The long incubation period.
5, For the newly emerged cases, it was also very difficult to track the contact history.
Imagine this scenario, when the experters asked all found close contact people if they felt sick or not, they all gave "no" answer. What conclusion you would draw?
In most cases,
scientific conclusions are based on statistics. Statistics needs one thing: big number samples. Without enough samples, it is very easy to draw a wrong conclusion. In this virus case, big number cases need one thing: more time. And the "more time" became the pretext used by west to blame China.