Yet local officials initially withheld information from the central government in Beijing about the outbreak.20 An employee of one Chinese genomics company said that on January 1 an official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission instructed the company to stop testing samples related to the Wuhan outbreak and destroy all of the lab’s remaining specimens. The impulse to contain the troubling results eventually spread to officials in Beijing. Two days later, on January 3, the country’s top health authority, the National Health Commission, ordered the local genomics labs not to publish any
...more
