The novel coronavirus epidemic has reached a critical juncture. Steps taken over the next few days, particularly by Beijing’s leadership, will decide the fate of the virus and whether it spreads internationally to become a genuine pandemic. Time is short for the Chinese government to prevent a catastrophe.

Are China’s official reports, including claims that its control efforts are succeeding and the epidemic will soon peak, credible? Omens look bad. Once praised by the World Health Organization (WHO) and scientists worldwide for its quick, transparent response to the newly named COVID-19, China now faces international vilification and potential domestic unrest as it blunders through continued cover-ups, lies, and repression that have already failed to stop the virus and may well be fanning the flames of its spread.

Since the epidemic came to the world’s attention in early January it has been marked by startling moments when China’s health authorities announced dramatic surges in apparent cases of the disease, none more surprising than the sudden Feb. 12 adjustment that saw case numbers in Hubei province swell by 14,840 in a single day, pushing the national total to 59,804 cases. The adjustment, according to government officials, was due to a widening definition of the disease for just one place, Hubei Province, while authorities continue to limit their COVID-19 case descriptions elsewhere in China by a prior approach, counting smaller numbers.

The pneumonia death last week of China’s real epidemic hero, the ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, has revealed the ugliest side of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its terrible effort to rewrite the history of a seemingly out-of-control epidemic. Li treated patients in December in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, who looked like SARS cases, he told colleagues on Dec. 30 via a doctors’ social media chatroom. Days later, for the so-called crime of rumormongering, Li and seven other physicians were brought before China’s security police and compelled to sign a document admitting to “spreading lies.” For days, Wuhan authorities sought to stifle Li’s voice, but even after he caught the virus while treating his patients and was confined to an intensive care unit bed, he continued to sound epidemic alarms on the BBC World Service. On Feb. 6, the once-robust 34-year-old physician died. Li’s death opened the gates of political rage across China, sparking an unprecedented outpouring of grief and outrage, denouncing the government cover-up.

Some China watchers have likened the coronavirus crisis for Chinese President Xi Jinping to the threat the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986 posed to Mikhail Gorbachev’s hold on the Soviet Union. Others have likened the young martyred physician’s brave truth-telling to the legendary “Tank Man,” an anonymous citizen who stood, grocery bags in hand, before a line of Chinese tanks, blocking their entry into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and their use to quell the 1989 pro-democracy student protests.

As the China expert Bill Bishop wrote last week in his daily Sinocism newsletter, “The Party’s social contract with the people—ensuring the people’s well being and providing ever-increasing economic prosperity—is being stressed on a nationwide level in ways I don’t recall in the past several decades.” He added: “Last Friday I wrote that ‘this is as close to an existential crisis for Xi and the Party that I think we have seen since [the Tiananmen massacre of] 1989’, and I think it is even more so a week later.” Just before I read Bishop’s assessment, I did a CBS News podcast with my former Council on Foreign Relations colleague Elizabeth Economy, one of the world’s top experts on Chinese politics. She, too, labeled Li’s death and apparent splits inside the CCP over how best to handle the epidemic as the most significant threat to his power Xi has faced and a critical test of the viability of the entire current leadership of the CCP. No leader since Mao Zedong has consolidated as much power and control as Xi, which leaves China’s leader vulnerable to blame in times of catastrophe.

This is much more than inside-baseball Chinese politics. It matters deeply for businesses wondering how long the pain of China’s shutdown will last and for public health leaders worried about how they might handle the coronavirus should it spread inside their countries, states, or cities. It has spilled over onto WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who has faced sharp criticism—even a recall petition—for his meetings with Xi and other Chinese leaders and his apparent reluctance to declare the outbreak a global health emergency.

For his part, Xi disappeared from public view the day after his January 27 meeting the WHO’s Ghebreyesus, not to be seen again for twelve days, when he briefly strolled through the Chaoyang district of Beijing, wearing a medical mask.

The political crisis in China is prompting global concern about the reliability of epidemic data released by the Chinese government, the usefulness of Chinese guidance regarding how the virus is spread and who is at risk for death, and the measures best taken to protect health care workers from falling victim to the disease they are trying to treat. Since the first Dec. 30 announcement of a new disease in Wuhan, the CCP has woven a tapestry of narratives, primarily for domestic political purposes, aligning official case and death numbers with the storylines. Meanwhile, the international health community, from WHO all the way down to academic statisticians and infectious diseases analysts, has tried to infer from the dubious official daily tallies just how dangerous the coronavirus disease may be for the rest of the world.

The bottom line is trust, which appears to be waning inside China and is increasingly unraveling across the public health world. An epidemic cannot be fought and won unless the bonds of trust between governments and people can survive the grief, confusions, emotions, and medical challenges of the battle. The Chinese government, in its negligence, has jeopardized those bonds, perhaps beyond all repair.

As anxiety rose, Xi tried to shift blame, naming to head up the epidemic response and dispatching Premier Li Keqiang to Wuhan. Xi lashed out against “untruthful speech,” focusing on those who were using Weibo and other social media to cast doubts on the containment policy and bemoan their confinements. And he forwarded an added narrative, blaming the U.S. government for China’s plight. On Jan. 30, the same day that WHO declared the epidemic a public health emergency of international concern, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a travel advisory to Americans, warning against visiting China. During the first week of February, the restrictions placed on U.S. airlines, airports, Chinese immigrants, travelers reentering the United States, and trade in key goods between the nations mounted. By Feb. 3, hospitals all over China were reporting shortages of test kits, forcing a large reduction in diagnosis and the reporting of cases. A medical academic and a member of the high-level expert team put together by the Chinese National Health Commission warned: “Early detection, early diagnosis, early isolation, and early treatment cannot be done in Wuhan at this time. I hope that the country will support Wuhan.” That same day, the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee held a meeting, formulating a new narrative: that the epidemic was out of control because of poor management. The CCP would now lead a “people’s war” against the virus, clamping down even harder on quarantines and rumors. The epidemic ought to be easy to control, given 80 percent of its victims were over 60 years of age, 75 percent had bodies weakened by some other health condition, and, curiously, very few were children and 66 percent were men, according to the new official datasets. In a plea for patriotism, the CCP urged people to identify ailing neighbors and turn them into authorities. Eventually, in at least one town, payments were promised, equivalent to about a third of an average Chinese adult’s monthly income. The identified were removed—sometimes forcibly—from their homes and placed in makeshift field hospitals set up in schools and sports facilities. As international experts questioned whether the virus could be stopped, Beijing threw more resources to the warehousing of suspected cases and hospitalization of those with pneumonia. But by Feb. 5, the funeral parlors and crematoriums were reported to be having problems keeping up with the disposal of the dead in Wuhan. Though no data was provided to address the matter, Wuhan’s lockdown was endangering not only the lives of coronavirus-infected individuals but also those of thousands of people who required medications and occasional treatment for such things as HIV infection, kidney disease, diabetes, and hypertension. Hospitals no longer welcomed them, medicines were running out, yet there is no count of their numbers or deaths. Across Hubei, hospitals were by the end of the first week of February running out of beds, respirators, and oxygen and pneumonia support equipment. As more cities saw their case numbers soar, they followed Wuhan’s lockdown and quarantine strategy. On Feb. 14, China’s National Health Commission finally acknowledged the toll COVID-19 was taking on healthcare workers, saying 1,716 of them had been infected on the job, and six had died of the pneumonia disease. A photo of the late ophthalmologist Li Wenliang rests among bouquets at the Houhu Branch of Wuhan Central Hospital on Feb. 7. STR/AFP via Getty Images

Then, on Feb. 6, Li Wenliang died of the coronavirus disease, sparking an outcry from across the nation, filled with undeniable rage. The government responded to the outpouring of grief and anger by censoring social media posting and blocking accounts. Cecilia Wang—a Shanghai-based reporter for the Economist—tweeted in real time a scrubbing operation unfolding on Chinese social media, as comments about the government’s handling of the epidemic were erased from digital history. On Feb. 8, it was reported that Xi had appointed his protégé Chen Yixin, a man with no medical or scientific background, as second in command of the team in charge of handling the epidemic crisis in Hubei. Chen’s expertise is law enforcement, and he heads China’s most powerful domestic security commission. As Chen swept into Wuhan, heads rolled among the preexisting Hubei and Wuhan epidemic leadership.

On Feb. 9, the official numbers showed a slowing in new case reports—a trend that would persist until the enormous Feb. 12 spike in numbers. During this three-day window, two new narratives emerged. First, that the epidemic had reached its peak. And second, that it was time for the nation to get back to work, restoring the Chinese economy.

But stability was hardly anywhere to be found across the country. In one of the hardest-hit cities in China, Huanggang, the local CCP leader said the municipality could test only 900 people a day. A citywide search identified 13,000 fever patients. Fatality rates, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), varied across the nation, with 4 percent of those sick with the coronavirus disease dying in Wuhan and 5 percent of cases proving lethal in Tianmen. But it was difficult to ascribe credibility to those estimates because nobody really knew the baseline—how many people were infected. Not only were too few people getting tested, but the diagnostic kits were so difficult to execute properly that there was a false negative rate as high as 50 percent, meaning some labs were missing half of all infections.

As the makeshift quarantine facilities filled, questions arose about their safety, as people were stacked side by side and shared toilet facilities. There was clear evidence that the coronavirus disease could be spread via feces or the off-gassing from overused toilets and taxed plumbing.

On Feb. 10, Xi sacked two of Hubei’s top health officials, amid claims that the virus could sicken 5 percent of Wuhan’s population, or half a million people. Three days later, Hubei’s party secretary was replaced by a Xi loyalist.

Wu Zunyou is the chief epidemiologist for China’s CDC, ultimately responsible for estimating and counting the toll of the coronavirus epidemic. On Feb. 13, he spoke with Howard Bauchner, the editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, defending the accuracy of China’s epidemic numbers. Admitting that diagnostic kits were in short supply and could be difficult to use, he nevertheless insisted that the epidemic was winding down. As more of the infected come to the end of their incubation periods, Wu argued, transmission will slow, and it will be clear that China’s control methods have, indeed, worked.

Robert Redfield, who heads the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN this week that he was far less optimistic. “Right now we’re in an aggressive containment mode,” Redfield said. “We don’t know a lot about this virus. This virus is probably with us beyond this season, beyond this year, and I think eventually the virus will find a foothold and we will get community-based transmission.”

In Geneva this week, some 400 top infectious diseases experts gathered to help WHO solve the many mysteries that still surround the virus. One of them was Hong Kong University’s Gabriel Leung, who does not think China’s strategy will succeed and fears that as schools reopen and millions of people return to Wuhan and other locked-down cities, the virus could, once again, surge. And it could spread far beyond China’s borders, possibly infecting more than 60 percent of the world population.

The new coronavirus could spread far beyond China’s borders, possibly infecting more than 60 percent of the world population.

Even if the coronavirus disease kills only 1 percent of its victims, 1 percent of 60 percent of 7 billion people is a staggering death toll, placing the coronavirus alongside the three biggest pandemics of human history—the 14th-century plague, the 1918 influenza, and the current HIV/AIDS toll.

I prefer to believe that humanity will contain the coronavirus to a far less horrible level for long enough to develop an effective vaccine. But this will require a massive effort over long stretches of time. Novel vaccines require years of research and testing.

Unfortunately, China is showing how all this can go wrong, making a crisis into a catastrophe. Xi’s government has provided the world with reams of data, but their credibility, or lack thereof, is inextricably bound to the CCP’s methods of governance, censorship, intimidation, and toadyism. The rest of the world is left to prognosticate and prepare without really knowing what havoc the coronavirus enemy is capable of wreaking.