China refused to provide WHO team with COVID-19 raw data

Shanghai, Feb 13 (Reuters):
China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to a World Health Organization-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, one of the team’s investigators said, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began.
The team had requested raw patient data on the 174 cases of COVID-19 that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the team. Such raw data is known as ‘line listings’, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed. ‘That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,’ he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine. He said that gaining access to the raw data was especially important since only half of the 174 cases had exposure to the Huanan market, the now-shuttered wholesale seafood centre in Wuhan where the virus was initially detected.
‘That’s why we’ve persisted to ask for that,’ he said. ‘Why that doesn’t happen, I couldn’t comment. Whether it’s political or time or it’s difficult … But whether there are any other reasons why the data isn’t available, I don’t know. One would only speculate.’
While the Chinese authorities provided a lot of material, he said the issue of access to the raw patient data would be mentioned in the team’s final report. ‘The WHO people certainly felt that they had received much much more data than they had ever received in the previous year. So that in itself is an advance.’
The WHO-led probe had been plagued by delay, concern over access and bickering between Beijing and Washington, which accused China of hiding the extent of the initial outbreak and criticised the terms of the visit, under which Chinese experts conducted the first phase of research.
The WHO did not reply to a request from Reuters for comment. The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.