WHO Impressed by Chinese Response to Coronavirus Outbreak
By Padraig McGrath
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On July 1st 1941, the Soviet Politburo created the Council for Evacuations, an emergency governing body tasked with organizing the evacuation of people, food, farm-livestock, other goods and entire factory complexes to the Urals region before they could be captured or requisitioned by the advancing Wehrmacht. The deputy-chairman of this committee, a 37 year-old bureaucrat named Alexei Kosygin, was given special responsibility for the evacuation of factories, with a priority placed on industries connected to the Soviet military-industrial complex.

Between July and November 1941, he succeeded in expediting the evacuation of no fewer than 1,300 entire factory complexes, and their rapid reassembly and re-commencement of production. One such factory was #183 in Kramatorsk, which employed 60,000 workers for 24-hour tank-production. The factory was still operational in Kramatorsk in October 1941, was evacuated in November, and resumed full production in Chelyabinsk in December. Kosygin went on to have a long and illustrious Politburo career – minister for light industry, minister for finance, architect of the 1965 economic reforms package, chairman of GOSPLAN, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers (official Soviet head of state) for 15 years before his death in 1980.

The Chinese government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak might not quite match those Herculean feats of crisis-management, but the news of the past few days is nonetheless somewhat reminiscent of Kosygin’s achievements. In Geneva on January 29th, the World Health Organization team assembled to address the coronavirus outbreak gave a glowing assessment of the Chinese government’s response to the crisis.

Dr. Maria Van Der Kerkhove of the WHO stated that one of the reasons why the growth in coronavirus diagnoses has been so rapid is because the Chinese government had published a full genome-mapping of the new variant within days of the initial outbreak, making diagnosis easier. This is possible partially because China has been producing an academic golden generation of doctoral candidates in the biological sciences over the past 15-20 years.




China has got an absolutely massive academic talent-pool in the life-sciences, especially in molecular biology, microbiology and biochemistry.

In other words, Dr. Van Der Kerkhove argued, the rapid increase in newly diagnosed cases should be interpreted as a positive rather than as a negative, insofar as it was an indicator of the proficiency of the Chinese response.

It is historically unprecedented that the entire genome-sequence of a new virus is published within days of the virus’ first appearance.

Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, stated that

“China and Chinese scientists have performed probably the most rapid characterization of a novel pathogen in history, and that was shared immediately. Multiple sequences were shared immediately on global platforms.”
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