Xi Jinping knew about the coronavirus outbreak nearly two weeks before going public

China’s strongman, Communist leader Xi Jinping knew of the outbreak of the coronavirus in the city of Wuhan almost two weeks prior to publicly acknowledging the epidemic on January 20.
In an internal statement published on February 15, during a January 7 meeting with the Politburo Standing Committee, a group that consists of the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi gave orders “for the prevention and control of the new coronavirus pneumonia.” That directive is being seen by many as an indication that Xi was well-aware of the threat that the coronavirus posed to the population and that he intended local officials to deal with the situation before it became a worldwide epidemic.

The statement came amid pressure from China’s increasingly angry population and the international community over the way Chinese authorities handled the coronavirus outbreak during its early stages.
Earlier in February, two senior Communist officials who were responsible for Hubei province, the hardest-hit region, were fired due to their mishandling of the crisis. 337 other officials in Hubei were also “penalised” for negligence and poor governance.
The fact that high-ranking Communist officials within the Standing Committee knew about the outbreak as early as January 7 and failed to take any measures, raises the question of whether the Chinese national government could have contained the virus before killing over 1,700 people and infecting more than 71,000 worldwide. The leaked documents now reveal that Xi and the Chinese leadership had full knowledge of the deadly potential of the coronavirus two days before any public accounts had been released. It was only on January 9, Xi orders to the Standing Committee indicated that they needed to acknowledge that the outbreak was, in fact, a deadly virus.
According to the World Health Organization, the records published at the time indicate that the Communist Party classified the virus as specific “cases of pneumonia”, with only 44 cases reported; 11 of which were considered critical.
By the time Xi and the Politburo publicly acknowledged that coronavirus was a rapidly spreading epidemic on January 20, there were already 282 confirmed cases – 278 in China, one in Japan, Thailand with two, and one in South Korea.