The second wave did not even reach China. How is that possible?

While Europe, the USA, South America and part of Asia are in the middle of the second, and sometimes even the third, wave, in China, where it all started, the second wave never came.

How is that possible?

As Index.hr writes, China's success in controlling the virus is not only the result of an authoritarian political system, but above all the result of setting public health as a national priority.

Associate professor of international studies Elana Uretski from Brandis University made this claim for the non-profit scientific portal "The Conversation", claiming that her scientific research confirms this hypothesis.

China, in fact, learned a hard lesson from the SARS pandemic, the predecessor of the current pandemic in 2002 and 2003. China's response then was to cover up the epidemic, trying to preserve its economy and international reputation at the cost of human lives. Although SARS spread around the world, humanity was lucky.

Its much higher mortality at the same time made it much less contagious, which is why the outbreak caused only 774 officially confirmed deaths, mostly in China and Hong Kong, before it was eradicated.

After that experience, China significantly improved the training of public health professionals and developed one of the most sophisticated systems for monitoring infectious diseases in the world, writes Uretski. This enabled her, 17 years later, to, despite the initial delay in responding to the new epidemic, and even hiding the seriousness of the situation from the World Health Organization and the international community, in the end still quickly and efficiently mobilize her enormous resources to bring the epidemic under control.

CNN, among others, wrote about China's cover-up of the epidemic in its initial phase, referring to internal documents of the Communist Party obtained by journalists, as well as the German Bild and Spiegel.

The announcement by the WHO, in which the claim of the Chinese authorities that there is no evidence that the new coronavirus is transmitted from person to person - although at that moment, according to the knowledge of the Western media, the leadership of the Chinese Party already had evidence of such transmission, was especially echoed.

Has the WHO made the biggest mistake in its history?

Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang became famous as the whistle-blower hero who first reported a suspected outbreak of a new form of SARS to his superiors, earning him an official warning from the police for "spreading unsubstantiated rumours", only to be infected himself and died of covid-19.

Also this week, CNN presented an explosive new revelation, based on internal documents it obtained from a whistleblower in the Chinese health system, according to which China has for months been publishing far lower numbers of new cases than it has determined.

Officially, the epidemic of the second SARS, i.e. covid-19, killed more than four and a half thousand people throughout China, primarily in the province of Hubei, i.e. its largest city, Wuhan.

However, given the size of China, these numbers are almost unfathomably small compared to the number of infected and dead in other countries. That contrast is best illustrated by a comparison with the US, which has more than four times the population but has so far had more than 14 million confirmed cases and 277.000 deaths, according to the Worldometers website - 60 times more deaths than China.

The coronavirus, despite smaller outbreaks across the country, did not spread massively outside of Hubei, at least not to the extent that the spread could no longer be stopped.

China decided to close first Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million inhabitants, and then almost the entire province of Hubei, a total of more than 50 million people in a series of cities.

This mass quarantine, better known by the English term "lockdown", the first of its kind in history, was personally ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling for a "people's war" against the epidemic.

At the height of the "lockdown", 760 million Chinese were under mild or severe restrictions on leaving their homes.

Authorities used sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment, even using drones to get people off the streets, and facial recognition software was linked to a mandatory mobile app that color-coded people according to their risk of infection, depending on can they enter shopping malls, subways and other public spaces.

In order to enter many spaces, a person needs to have a green code and a corresponding QR code, and that system is still in effect today, reports CNN.

In some cases, the police forcibly quarantined people and even literally welded the doors of the apartments and houses of infected residents of Wuhan, which resembled a ghost town.

Human rights activists claimed that the sick were left to die in their homes, either from starvation or disease. It is still an open question how many patients died in their homes, and their deaths were never counted and listed in official records because they were never tested for covid-19.

Also, the reason that the second wave did not arrive in China, at least officially, is that there are no democratic restrictions there, as for example in Europe or America.