The experts found crucial flaws in the global response in early 2020, including a delay in declaring an emergency, a failure to impose travel restrictions and an entire "lost month" when countries neglected to respond to warnings, letting the virus quickly spread into a catastrophic pandemic.
Co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former president of Liberia, said: "We are calling for a new surveillance and alert system that is based on transparency and allows WHO to publish information immediately." Looking back at the early days of the pandemic, the experts noted that Chinese doctors had reported cases of unusual pneumonia in December 2019. The WHO picked up reports from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control and others.
Governments, meanwhile, failed to grasp that the emergency declaration was the WHO's "loudest possible alarm", the experts said. The panel did not lay specific blame on China for its actions in the early days of the pandemic, or on WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus, accused by the United States under then-President Donald Trump of being too deferential to Beijing.
Get this one under control first and beat it. Before thinking of another pandemic.