Chinese health officials clueless on coronavirus

Chinese health officials clueless on coronavirus

CHINA — Chinese health officials are struggling to answer questions about recent developments in the country.

On January 29th, two senior health officials were asked a set of basic questions about the virus during an interview in Huanggang, a city to the east of Wuhan.

State broadcaster CCTV sat down with Tang Zhihong, chief of the city's health commission, and Chen Mingxing, director of the city's Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

However, they either couldn't answer the questions or couldn't agree.

The Huanggang government announced that Tang had been dismissed from her position the following day.

But they're not the only ones to suffer a media mishap, Sheng Wenjun the Communist Party Secretary of quarantined Chibi City was caught wearing his surgical mask incorrectly during an inspection of his city's response to the virus.

Worst of all, at a press conference on the 26th of January, the governor of Hubei Province didn't even wear a mask; the Hubei secretary did, however, he too didn't cover his nose and the mayor wore his inside out.

On January 29th, Zeng Guang, the chief scientist of epidemiology at China's CDC, made a rare and honest admission about why Chinese officials cannot tell people the truth, saying that they, "need to think about the political angle and social stability" in order to keep their positions.