This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, April 4th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Even if the data coming out of China didn't deserve serious skepticism.

The government's response to the outbreak

as it spread across the globe was, to say the least,

tone-deaf.

Cato's Eric Gomez details some of the missteps. How do you evaluate China's initial response

to this coronavirus outbreak? They definitely did several things that I think made the

outbreak worse, notably censorship of medical authorities in

Uhan, the city where the virus originated from. And it's difficult to tell at the moment if this censorship was a situation where people in Beijing were saying,

don't let this get out, or if it was a situation where local officials were panicking about a potential outbreak

but they didn't know how bad it was going to get and then they tried to clamp things down

and keep it controlled. But in any case that kind of information control or

information lack of it getting out helped I think encourage this pandemic to spread beyond China.

And as a lot of people aren't really very trustful of China's more recent numbers that is having days where there were essentially no new cases that the Chinese government announced.

All that aside, it seemed as if the government took a bit of a victory lap as this virus was

spanning the globe. That's right they said that they had successfully dealt with it and that you know as you said reporting that their numbers were low when in actuality they probably weren't.

It is, I think it is important to note that as the virus was starting to gain traction in China,

the Chinese government didn't quite try to hide it internally in terms of how

she jin pang and other senior leaders talked about it they clearly acknowledged that it

was a problem and that they were implementing it lockdowns of whole cities and other pretty restrictive movement controls in order to contain it.

And now it's switched to this victory lap stage where the propaganda organs are talking about, you know, hey, we have the model, we have the success story, let's do things, but like you said, because of the censorship at the initial stage now there's a lot of

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