China Coronavirus Update: Wuhan Doctor Who Identified COVID-19 Defends China; Provides Justification For Not Making Information Public

Wuhan doctor who first identified COVID-19 in China and treated the first set of patients has come forward in support of the local Chinese authorities. In a recent interview, she said that the local authorities were quick in responding to the situation to minimize the damage.

The interview has come amidst the global outrage wherein the Chinese government is being accused of hiding facts and not sharing timely information with the World Health Organization (WHO) to control the spread of the coronavirus. Moreover, the Chinese officials have also been accused of silencing the medical professionals who tried to share the information about the severity of COVID-19 with the international community and media.

The interview was aired on the CGTN news channel, which is owned by the state-funded China Central Television organization.

Zhang Jixian, who works at Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine in the central city of Wuhan, revealed that she and her colleagues had identified seven patients in later December with the same set of symptoms. Upon reporting to the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a team was sent for further investigation.

"They came immediately in the afternoon to conduct an epidemiological investigation, collected blood samples from the patients and did throat swab tests, and they also checked the related etiology to see what the origin could be," Zhang said.

She also said that the team for again sent on Dec. 29, 2019 to collect blood samples and ask the medical history. So, she believes that it was a timely response. However, she confessed that nobody expected to get the situation this bad with thousands of casualties.

President Xi Jinping has been accused in the past for having sitting with the information about COVID-19 and not letting it out for 6 days as people traveled within the country and abroad around the time of the Lunar New Year.

But Zhang came forward to defend the delay in making the information public. She explained that they were still trying to understand the virus and its effects and the limited information was not appropriate to make public.

"If it is me doing the research, how could I tell the public before I have come to a clear conclusion?” she explained.

With China revising the death toll in Wuhan by up to 50 percent, it further firms the global belief that the country indeed tried to hide the actual number of reported cases and deaths in the city where the coronavirus epidemic started.