Details of the fiasco will, no doubt, be studied for years to come. But some things already seem clear. At the beginning of the crisis, for example, politics seem to have impeded the free flow of honest statistics—a problem we’ll return to in the eighth chapter. Taiwan has complained that in late December 2019 it had given important clues about human-to-human transmission to the World Health Organization—but as late as mid-January, the WHO was reassuringly tweeting that China had found no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
