Welcome to Axis Pro Radha, where we normally take 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

But today we're doing a special five-part series on the coronavirus pandemic, which is changing our economy, our politics, and our way of life.

I'm Dan for Mac. This particular episode is focused on how COVID-19 is impacting

China's global role and U.S.-China relations, and I am pleased to be joined by Axios' Bethany,

Alan Abraham. Bethany, China seemed to start by kind of bungling its response, but has now stepped into

a leadership role. Can you briefly kind of outline what China did and didn't do?

Yeah.

So in the beginning, it was the middle of December when Chinese doctors in Hubei province

started realizing that there was a mysterious pneumonia case that was appearing in some of

their patients.

And by December 27th, a local health commission knew about it.

But on December 30th, local officials started a kind of a cover-up.

They tried to stop doctors from talking about it.

And even all the way up through January 23rd, 24th, in that whole time, there was just very half-hearted efforts to stop the spread.

And the local officials weren't very honest about it up until around January

23rd, 24th when they finally locked down the city of Wuhan.

And so that gave the virus.

You know, there was about three weeks there where there could have been strong measures

put in place to prevent it spread, but because of a cover-up, because of a sort of a bungling of the response, it was allowed

to spread. So that was the initial early mistakes. That's kind of a mirroring of what we saw

here, too, to a certain extent, when you think of that time, you know, three weeks kind of complete

inaction. I wanted what China did after that, where as you say, they shut down the city, they

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