French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday joined western democracies in questioning China’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
“Let’s not be so naive as to say [China has] been much better at handling this. We don’t know. There are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about”, Macron said.
His comments come as China is making efforts to put a positive sheen on its handling of the epidemic, sometimes at the expense of western counterparts like France.
Earlier this week, documents leaked to the media showed that after Chinese officials secretly determined they were likely facing a pandemic, they warned the public 6 days later. In those days, the city of Wuhan hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people, and millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.
The former head of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service said that China should answer for hiding crucial information about the coronavirus outbreak from the rest of the world.
Last month, several top UK government officials said that the government is furious after scientists pointed out that China probably downplayed its number of cases of the virus “by a factor of 15 to 40 times”.
Later, authorities in the Chinese of Wuhan, the original epicenter of the outbreak, have revised the number of virus-related deaths up by 1,290 to 3,869. That represents an increase of 50% on earlier figures.
United States intelligence officials confirmed that the US is exploring the possibility that the virus was accidentally released from a Chinese lab, after evidence emerged that the wet market, which China blamed for the spread of the virus did not sell bats, and the first patient, as well as multiple other early cases, did not have any connection to the market.
China has also imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of the coronavirus. Under the new directive issued on March 25, scientific research papers about tracing the origin of the virus must first be approved by the education ministry.
France is one of the hardest-hit countries, with 108,847 confirmed cases and 17,920 deaths from the virus.
