China reports zero local transmission of the novel coronavirus for the first time.
China, the original epicenter of the coronavirus, is emerging as the first country to win the battle. Three months after the first cases, the Chinese government announced yesterday that there were no more local transmissions.
247 - China announced that, in the last 24 hours, it recorded no cases of local transmission of the coronavirus for the first time since the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic in the country three months ago, according to journalist Javier C. Hernández. New York Times.
While Italy, the US, and other countries suffer from what has become a pandemic, the case of China shows what can be achieved when strict, top-down measures, implemented without any dissent, are put into practice with a single objective.
This achievement represents a turnaround for the Chinese government, which generated a large wave of public outrage by initially concealing and mismanaging the outbreak, including punishing doctors who tried to raise the alert level and people who posted about the growing cases of the disease on social media.
These early mistakes, according to critics, allowed the virus to spread uncontrollably through the city of Wuhan, forcing the government to impose draconian travel restrictions and quarantines on hundreds of millions of people.
The authoritarian approach, seen by many as a brutal and unprecedented experiment, caused the country to rapidly reduce the number of new infections at an immense cost.