To be fair, China already delcared state of emergency months ago, but for the WHO to declare pandemic and recognize it as a international problem, it has to be that other countries has also done that. WHO cannot predict things, and they can't declare Pandemic when what they have is mere suspicion, it has to be an actual pandemic to declare. I'm pretty sure numerous experts have warned about the pandemic thing.

Ok, the WHO has to wait until it's a pandemic to declare it a pandemic. But if it's already a pandemic how does that help?

Wouldn't it be better if the WHO actually helped prevent the pandemic in the first place?

I'm pretty sure WHO is involved early on along with the Chinese authories when they first spotted it. They are already helping.

WHO is merely declaring matter of fact about the virus's spreading. Which is kind of it's primary function, to declare things and publish reports so the governments can act on them. They can't really do much beyond that.

> Which is kind of it's primary function, to declare things and publish reports so the governments can act on them

Thanks for clarifying, I thought the WHO was more like a global CDC.

Wuhan was probably a lot further up the curve of exponential spreading before China took any action than a superficial reading of the stats would suggest. Their reported cases were basically rate-limited by how fast they could test people with the most obvious and serious symptoms at the point they locked down Wuhan. It's not clear exactly how bad it was - I don't think there's much data out there - but there's a couple of alarming numbers quietly tucked away in the WHO joint mission's report. Apparently they went back and tested samples taken from people in Wuhan with influenza-like symptoms at the start of January. 1 out of 20 samples from the first week of January tested positive and 3 out of 20 samples from the second week. That's... not good. (No numbers are given for subsequent weeks.)

There's no particular reason to assume it would take the same path in other countries took some sort of action, even if the actions weren't nearly as forceful as a complete lockdown. Especially since that lockdown was basically a blind and desperate shot in the dark based on incomplete and dubious information.

in Germany in January people talked about: - well, it's China, you know, they don't have nice hospitals there - the flu is killing people too and you're not vaccinated! - our democratic society will be much better at containing that, people are mord open - the methods in China are soooo stoneage, we are good at contact tracing.

So: no, there was no objective reason to think it would not go global, but it was faaaar away...

"that's two-months-from-now-me's problem!"