China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention has such low status in the country that there was a delay in alerting higher authorities to the new coronavirus, widely-followed epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan says at a press conference. “Except for reporting to upper levels of authorities, the CDC has no power to make any decision for the next move,” Zhong said, according to a CNBC translation of his Mandarin-language remarks.
He was the first to identify the SARS virus and played a pivotal role in fighting its outbreak in 2003.