The coronavirus was already spreading around the world before China acted to combat its spread for approximately three weeks, according to a timeline generated by Axios. And those three weeks were extremely consequential.

A study by the University of Southampton published this month tells us how China’s cover-up affected the spread of the virus:

The study estimates that by the end of February 2020 there was a total of 114, 325 COVID-19 cases in China. It shows that without non-pharmaceutical interventions – such as early detection, isolation of cases, travel restrictions and cordon sanitaire – the number of infected people would have been 67 times larger than that which actually occurred. The research also found that if interventions in the country could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively – significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.

A recent poll from Rasmussen Reports shows that 42 percent of Americans “feel that China should pay at least some of the world’s coronavirus bills.”

Unfortunately, there are some in the media and the Democratic Party who are more outraged by people calling the coronavirus the “Chinese coronavirus” or the “Wuhan virus” because, they say, it’s xenophobic and racist. China needs to be held accountable for their failure to curb the spread of the virus at its onset, but based on the current climate in the United States, blaming Trump is far more politically convenient.

_____

Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis