Passengers who just arrived on a train from Wuhan, China, being screened for coronavirus in Beijing. As the Wuhan coronavirus death toll rose to at least 18 on Thursday, the Chinese government is facing questions over its vice grip on the flow of information in the early days of the outbreak. In early January, the Wuhan police said they had arrested eight people accused of spreading "rumors" about what was then a mysterious pneumonia causing serious complications in patients. When the coronavirus made national headlines, more and more journalists began to describe being detained or threatened with arrest by Chinese authorities while reporting on the outbreak.
The Wuhan outbreak immediately harked back to the SARS epidemic in the early s , which the Chinese government tried to cover up.
The two viruses are in the same family , which also includes the common cold and pneumonia, but Wuhan so far is much milder than SARS. While the government was almost immediately forthcoming with the international community about this outbreak, its actions in suppressing information at home have left some experts concerned that it made the situation worse than it might have been.
Aside from the actions of the Chinese government, Eric Toner, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University, says the virus itself still has a lot of unknowns that health officials need to figure out.
Chinese officials first reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization on December Early on, officials cracked down on talk about the illness online. Just four days later, the Wuhan police said they had summoned eight people accused of spreading "rumors" about the virus. According to Poynter , the people who were arrested posted on the social network Weibo or other messaging apps that SARS was back. Poynter tried to figure out what had happened to the eight people but struggled.
