China had been preparing for an outbreak months before COVID began spreading in Wuhan, by stockpiling on PPEs, reports reveal.
According to NTD, a report from The Telegraph revealed that China, which is the world's largest manufacturer of personal protective equipment or PPE, had displayed a different kind of behavior with regards to the product months before an outbreak of the virus that causes COVID-19 happened in Wuhan.
China's exports of PPEs to the United States fell by about 50% between August and September of 2019. It "began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19," The Telegraph noted.
This discovery, per NTD, would challenge Beijing's often-touted theory that COVID originated in a seafood market in Wuhan, where the outbreaks were first recorded in December that same year.
The drop in China's PPE exports have caught the attention of many people, particularly two former U.S. officials namely Dr. Tom McGinn, a senior health adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, and Col. John Hoffman, a senior research fellow at the Food Protection and Defense Institute.
These officials looked at data and found that China started buying up PPEs from Australia, Europe and the U.S. around the same time that it reduced its PPE exports to other countries.
This kind of stockpiling behavior, according to one of the officials, said "this is not the normal up and down that occurs," referring to China's exportation and importation of PPEs.
NTD noted that these new findings add more questions to those that were posed throughout the two-year pandemic. Until now, the truth about the origins and sequence of events that happened before and during the pandemic, with regards to where COVID came from and how it first spread, remain unclear.
Finding the truth about the path of the infection is now even harder as Chinese authorities have taken actions against the spread-first by disinfecting the market where the virus is said to have originated from, and then by blocking off independent investigations looking into the labs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some believe the virus actually came from.
Desperate Measures
China's stockpiling of PPEs for use against the virus that spread from Wuhan is not the only thing it did, and continues to do, in response to outbreaks.
Recent reports indicate that China hasn't stopped its "zero-COVID" policy yet, and continues to lock down certain facilities and public spaces in various cities ahead of the CCP meet.
Shanghai, for example, recently experienced harsh lockdowns in different areas. Residents who lived in areas considered "high-risk" were banned from going out of their houses. Those who live in either in "medium-risk" or "low-risk" areas and were able to move are still limited depending on how their places are categorized.
