Cuba and China: A tale of two viral outbreaks

Trouble with China, North Korea, Cuba, and other communist dictatorships is that mendacity is part of their ideology, and there is no counterbalance in a totalitarian regime to hold them to account in the midst of an outbreak of disease.

Regimes in China and Cuba both seek political advantage in viral outbreaks

Pandemics have been with us throughout human history, but totalitarian regimes are a recent phenomenon. Both Cuba and China are totalitarian regimes and have a common playbook, and it can be seen with their responses to two recent viral outbreaks. It does not put people first, but the interests of their respective dictatorships.

First, let us briefly examine these two viruses and then how Cuban and Chinese officials responded to each of them.

Zika virus was identified in the Ziika Forest of Uganda in 1947 and spent decades spreading eastward through Asia and reaching the Americas with a major outbreak in 2015 -2017 that reached Cuba.

Zika virus

The Wuhan virus (SARS-CoV-2) the cause of a mysterious viral pneumonia cluster that first emerged in mid-November 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei province was identified in December 2019 and has now spread around the world in the span of a few months.

Wuhan virus

Responses by Cuba and China although at different ends of a viral outbreak, with different characteristics, including mortality and rate of spread, are similar in how regimes covered up the severity of the epidemic in their respective countries, punishing whistleblowers, and with the aid of international organizations and media outlets preserving the narrative that they are competent administrators with an effective response to a viral outbreak.

The Cuban response to Zika 2015- 2017
Countries across the Western hemisphere reported outbreaks of Zika to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 - 2016 and travel advisories were issued. A WHO map showed Caribbean islands surrounding Cuba all having some level of a Zika outbreak, but Cuba remained clear.

 February 2, 2016: The Nation published “Zika Is Circling Cuba. What Will Happen When It Lands?” by Greg Grandin that also contained the subtitle “Cuba’s public-health campaigns are famously aggressive—but so is the Zika virus.” The author mentions that “[o]ver in Cuba, Zika has yet to make an appearance. It’s circling. There have been cases in Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands.”

The Nation author did not mention that the Cuban government in 1997 covered up a dengue outbreak, jailing a Cuban doctor who had gone public for “enemy propaganda.” Amnesty International provided additional detail on what had happened.

Dr  Desi  Mendoza  Rivero,  president of the Santiago  de  Cuba  Independent  Medical  Association, ... had been detained on 25 June 1997 in Santiago de Cuba, after making statements, which were disseminated by foreign media, about an epidemic of dengue fever in Santiago de Cuba  which,  according  to  him,  had  caused  several  deaths.  He  reportedly  accused  the authorities  of  covering  up  the  true  extent  of  the  epidemic  and  of  not  taking  sufficient measures to control it. He was brought to trial on 18 November 1997 and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, charged with "enemy propaganda."

Instead the magazine article claimed that “when dengue and chikungunya began to spread, the government stepped up its efforts at vector control, committed to contain any outbreak that might scare visitors away.” Grandin should read Katherine Hirschfeld's Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898, to obtain a fresh perspective from an academic.

February 23, 2016: Raul Castro announced that he was dispatching the Cuban military to keep Zika out of Cuba, and that the island had yet to report a single case of the disease.

September 2, 2016: The Associated Press reported on the regime’s containment efforts. “Cuba is among the few countries in the Western Hemisphere that have so far prevented significant spread of the disease blamed for birth defects in thousands of children. Only three people have caught Zika in Cuba.”

August 2, 2017: The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene published the paper “Why Did Zika Not Explode in Cuba?” citing “Cuba’s early and successful response to Zika, grounded in the country’s long-standing dengue prevention and control program, serves as a model of rapid mobilization of intersectoral efforts.” It also ignored reports that Cuba had jailed doctors and covered up prior epidemics.

News stories of Zika transmissions with a Cuba link should have raised questions. The first case of sexually transmitted Zika reported to the Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County on August 1, 2017 was by a person whose partner had returned from Cuba with Zika symptoms.

January 2019: The New Scientist broke the news that "thousands of Zika virus cases went unreported in Cuba in 2017, according to an analysis of data on travelers to the Caribbean island. Veiling them may have led to many other cases that year."

Microcephaly is a birth defect associated with Zika

Yale School of Public Health’s Nathan Grubaugh and his colleagues estimated that the total cases of Zika in Cuba in 2017 alone would have been 5,700, and added that the “2017 Zika outbreak in Cuba was similar in size to the known 2016 outbreaks in countries with similar population sizes.”

Duane Gubler at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore said “Cuba has a history of not reporting epidemics until they become obvious, and Zika is only mildly symptomatic in adults.” Zika can trigger paralysis (Guillain-Barré Syndrome), and in pregnant women, it may cause subsequent and severe birth defects in their babies such as microcephaly (abnormally small heads and brains that can require life-long specialized care).

Did the World Health Organization (WHO) call the Castro regime to account for this failure in reporting or address the dismal state of healthcare for the average Cuban?

Honored to join President Miguel Díaz-Canel for the opening of #CubaSalud2018. Visiting #Cuba reminds me that #HealthForAll is not a dream for the future, it’s not just an aspiration; it’s a reality now. Cuba es un ejemplo para el mundo. ¡Queremos y tendremos #SaludParaTodos! pic.twitter.com/nfP82LrYNV

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) April 24, 2018

The Chinese response to Wuhan virus 2019-2020
Caixin Media Company Ltd., a Beijing-based media group founded in 2010, has been pushing the limits of free speech in China with hard hitting investigative journalism that has taken a hard look at how the response to the Wuhan virus initially unfolded.

The chronology of what happened from mid-November 2019 through February 1st is taken primarily from their reporting.

Initial case of Wuhan virus was traced back to November 17, 2019.

Test results from multiple labs in December 2019 suggested there was an outbreak of a new virus with an “alarming similarity to the deadly SARS coronavirus that killed nearly 800 people between 2002 and 2003.”

Chinese doctors and scientists who were investigating the outbreak and warning of the danger were silenced and told to destroy samples, cease releasing test results and information about them. Those who continued to speak out suffered the consequences.

December 30, 2019: Dr. Li Wenliang “was one of several in Wuhan who sounded the first alarms and released initial evidence online. Li, who was punished by the Chinese government for releasing the information, allegedly perished from the Wuhan virus five weeks later.”

Dr. Li Wenliang

January 1, 2020: An official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered companies that were sequencing genomes of samples from Wuhan related to the new disease be stopped, the samples destroyed, and to “immediately cease releasing test results and information about the tests.”

Whistle-blowers arrested for warning about SARS-CoV-2

January 3, 2020: China’s National Health Commission (NHC), the communist regime’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish information related to the Wuhan virus, “and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The order, which Caixin has seen, did not specify any designated testing institutions.”

January 9, 2020: Chinese authorities announced that a novel coronavirus was behind Wuhan’s viral pneumonia outbreak. Transmissibility of the virus was downplayed, leaving the public unaware of the imminent danger.

January 11, 2020: Wuhan Municipal Health Commission resumed updating infection cases of the new virus after suspending reports for several days. But the government repeated its claim that there had been no medical worker infections and that there was no evidence of human transmission, and reported that the number of confirmed cases had dropped to 41.

January 14, 2020 WHO reports no evidence of human to human transmission

According to Ho-fung Hung, Professor in Political Economy at the Department of Sociology & School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in his article "Holding Beijing Accountable For The Coronavirus Is Not Racist" published in the Journal of Political Risk,"Genetic sequencing research shows that the first cases of Coronavirus in Europe and the US entered from China as early as mid-January when Beijing was still busy covering up about the disease and assuring the world nothing serious was going on."

January 20, 2020: Zhong Nanshan, a leading authority on respiratory health who came to national attention in his role fighting SARS, confirmed in a TV interview that the disease was spreading from person-to-person.

Two days later, Wuhan, a city of 11 million, was placed in lockdown.

January 23, 2020: World Health Organization (WHO), that had based its response on reports provided by the Chinese government, said “novel coronavirus is not a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).”

January 30, 2020: WHO declared the Wuhan Virus a PHEIC, but continued to defend the Chinese response as exemplary, despite the previous months cover-up and spread of the virus around the world.

I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern over the global outbreak of #2019nCoV, not because of what is happening in #China, but because of what is happening in other countries.https://t.co/HNrxyGeoBA

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 30, 2020

On February 3, Xi Jinping in a speech to the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee emphasized the importance of “taking the initiative to influence international opinion” about the epidemic. "Since then," according to Professor Ho-fung Hung of Johns Hopkins University, "Chinese official media has been diligently criticizing foreign governments’ vigilance against the disease as overreaction and racism.. Ironically, Beijing chastised foreign governments for restricting travelers from China while it was itself putting tens of millions of Chinese citizens in lockdown."

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying "spread the misleading and unscientific notion that that the Coronavirus was less severe than the common flu in the US."  This shifted, but even a month later on March 4, 2020 the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman continued to talked down the severity of the outbreak, "The fact is that according to media reports, the 2009 H1N1 flu had a mortality rate of 17.4%. The mortality rate of MERS of 2012 was 34.4% and Ebola 40.4%. With China’s unrelenting efforts, the 2019-nCoV mortality rate in China is about 2.1%, much lower than the figures above. Since February 1, cured cases began to outnumber deaths. As of 12am February 3, a total of 632 patients have been cured and discharged. We have the confidence and the capability to win this battle."

Marcus Kolga in the March 20th essay "When will the Chinese government be held accountable for the spread of coronavirus?" raises a number of issues which are cited below with minor changes.

In contrast, Taiwan identified the outbreak and banned flights from Hubei before the end of 2019.
China did not identify the outbreak or limit flights until late January. During that time span five million people left Hubei, and the disease spread throughout China and the world.

Had China acted when Taiwan took action, the spread of the virus could have been reduced by 95 per cent. Thousands of lives, in China and around the world, would have been saved had China’s regime put aside its politics and acted swiftly.

Both the regimes in Cuba and China covered up the spread of viral outbreaks in their countries endangering lives to maintain the false narrative of superior health care. The two examples listed below are the most recent, but there have been others by both China and Cuba.

They continue to push these narratives in the midst of a global pandemic that may cost tens of millions of lives, and too many are willing to repeat their lies guaranteeing continued wrongdoing.

In many ways, #China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response. Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it. #2019nCoVhttps://t.co/GdUQZGvzkd

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) January 30, 2020

More examples of this "new standard of outbreak response" and archeologists of a future sentient species on Earth will be wondering how Homo Sapiens went extinct in the early 21st century.