You’re missing some important facts.

December 25: Wuhan Municipal Health Committee posted on social media, “An Urgent Notice on the Treatment of Pneumonia of Unknown Cause.”

December 31: China contacts WHO and informs them of “cases of pneumonia of unknown etymology detected in Wuhan.”

January 1: Huanan Seafood Market is closed.

January 3: China informs US CDC and other countries

January 10: The gene sequencing data of COVID-19 is posted online and shared with other researchers.

January 23: China goes into lockdown.

Taiwan, themselves, had a press conference where they showed the email they sent the WHO and it did not say human-to-human transmission.

> As there were no confirmed cases in Taiwan at the time, the [Taiwan] CDC could not definitively state that there had been human-to-human transmission of the disease, he added.

> “We would really be giving a misleading message if we firmly stated that there was human-to-human transmission, so we clearly alerted the IHR about the information we received,” he said.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/04/12/2...

> there were warnings from Taiwan about human-to-human transmission very early on

This has been proven to not be true. They had no more information than anyone, and the WHO also did not exclude the possibility of H2H at any point.

Just regarding your first statement: isn't 'no evidence of X' entirely different than 'evidence of no X'? Seems to me they were saying the first, but you're interpreting it as the second?

The vast majority of laypeople (inclusive of people who would be getting their information from the WHO's Twitter account) would readily interpret "no evidence of X" to be equivalent to "we shouldn't be worried about X". To pretend otherwise betrays a misunderstanding of how laypeople think.

If the WHO had a more nuanced stance, they should've made that clear - e.g. "We don't have evidence yet that the #coronavirus spreads human-to-human, but it's possible".

But the thing is, that was their stance. I agree that their tweet might show a lack of scientific communication skills or scientific education of the general public, the official recommendations have been very clear. Countries and public health organisations don't base decisions on a tweet. They go to the official guidance.

A Jan 1st interim guidance: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/surveil...

The first thing they recommend:

"The primary objectives of surveillance are to: 1. Detect confirmed cases/clusters of nCoV infection and any evidence of amplified or sustained human-to-human transmission;"

Then on Jan 10th:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/330374/WHO-... "As information about the etiology, clinical manifestations and transmission of disease in the cluster of respiratory disease patients identified in Wuhan is limited, WHO continues to monitor developments and will revise these recommendations as necessary."

Neither of those directly say "it's possible that the novel coronavirus, like other coronaviruses, is capable of human-to-human transmission", with the sole exception (to your credit) of one quote buried in a header in that second document: "route of transmission unknown but suspected to be respiratory".

Also, those documents seem to be focused entirely on laboratory testing and surveillance, not on, you know, treatment or prevention (beyond one section on preventing infection among medical/laboratory personnel, whence I pulled that quote) or risk assessment.

If these are the documents used for policymaking, then it seems their lack of communication skills extends even here. They'd benefit from a more bottom-line-up-front approach and making these suspicions more explicit; the documents as they stand read as a wishy-washy "well we don't quite know how this spreads and don't want to jump to any conclusions...", and it should be entirely unsurprising that policymakers interpreted that as "aight, WHO hasn't said it spreads between humans so nothing to worry about".

>Yes, that's how I interpret 'no clear evidence from preliminary investigations'.

If that is true, then you are just categorically not competent to be making interpretations of scientific statements. In a separate comment you cited a handful of sources that, on my reading you had clearly not interpreted accurately, and now you're advancing an argument that depends on a fallacy so obvious that would be dispensed with by a JV debate team.