Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Opinion columnist

Many experts are saying the virus from Wuhan, China, is turning into a global pandemic, with a mortality rate (based on official statistics) of roughly 2%. By contrast, the mortality rate of the 1918 Spanish Flu was 2.5%. The Spanish Flu was a global catastrophe, killing more people than World War I.

Will Wuhan be the same? Unclear.

Writing in The New York Times, Frankie Huang, an American in quarantine in Shanghai, reports that the problem is in trusting the official numbers: “Yesterday, I saw on social media that someone noticed that the ratio in the official figures for the total dead to the total diagnosed cases has remained exactly 2.1% every day since Jan. 30. ‘This magical virus is very good at math!’ I felt my face crumple as I stared at the numbers. I had forgotten that every piece of news must be examined for how it is being used to strengthen the regime’s rule. ... I so badly want to believe in the Chinese government when millions of lives are on the line.”

Closed channels of communication

Well, perhaps the Chinese officials lying, but perhaps they’re telling the truth, at least to the best of their ability. But while the Chinese government undoubtedly knows more than the rest of us about the scope of the problem, it probably knows a lot less than it would like to about what is going on. People are often afraid to report bad news, because the government has a history of punishing those who do.

Police in Yunnan province punished medical workers for sharing information about what was going on in their areas. And, of course, Li Wenliang, the doctor who first spoke out about the need for urgent action and shared his observations with medical associates, was formally reprimanded for rumor-mongering, likely resulting in a delay of weeks before the problem was taken seriously. Li died last week at the age of 34, apparently after he contracted it from a patient.

The Chinese government continues to censor news and social media. This not only keeps the rest of the world from knowing what’s going on, it also makes it harder for the government itself to keep track of what’s really happening, as opposed to what underlings are reporting to their superiors.

This is a problem for any organization, to some degree. People reporting to higher-ups generally try to put the best possible spin on things. If the reports go through several layers of management, the end result could wind up pretty far removed from the reality on the ground.

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It’s a bigger problem in authoritarian or totalitarian countries lacking free speech or a free press. On the one hand, such control over expression helps cement the authorities’ position in power. On the other hand, it also serves to keep the authorities ignorant about important developments. If there’s no way for information to end run around the various levels of management who report upward, then there’s no way for the people at the top to know whether they’re being told the truth.

Healthy systems of organization ensure that bad news can always flow from the bottom to the top. Systems that don’t do this become increasingly disconnected from reality and unstable.

If I were the Chinese leadership, I’d be worried.

The problem may be worse

Meanwhile, for the rest of us who know even less than the Chinese leadership, the question is just how bad this epidemic/pandemic is likely to get. Well, as Frankie Huang notes, we can’t always trust what the Chinese are saying. But to the extent that we can see what they’re doing, it looks like they’re pretty scared.

As I write this, they have many millions under quarantine. This drastic step, taken at considerable expense to China’s already sluggish economy, suggests something serious. At the same time though, China has been ignoring offers of help from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Is that because they don’t need the help, or because they have secrets they’d rather keep? For now, there’s no way to know.

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We can hope that first world sanitation and medical care, two things that China emphatically lacks, will keep things from getting out of control outside China. But it will be a few weeks yet before we’ll know for sure just how serious this outbreak is. And the result might even surprise the Chinese.

Even if this turns out to be more of a fizzle than a catastrophe, the Wuhan virus serves as a reminder that the interconnected global economy has downsides as well as upsides, and that our preparation for new disease outbreaks remains inadequate. Let’s hope the lessons from this experience will be learned, and that they won’t be too expensive.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself," is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.