As coronavirus spread in Wuhan, China's secret deals with businesses caused major testing blunders

WUHAN, China – In the early days in Wuhan, the first city first struck by the virus, getting a COVID-19 test was so difficult that residents compared it to winning the lottery. Throughout the Chinese city in January, thousands of people waited in hourslong lines for hospitals, sometimes next to corpses lying in hallways. But most couldn't get the test they needed to be admitted as patients. And for the few who did, the tests were often faulty, resulting in false negatives. The widespread test shortages and problems at a time when the virus could have been slowed were caused largely by secrecy and cronyism at China's top disease control agency, an Associated Press investigation has found. The flawed testing system prevented scientists and officials from seeing how fast the virus was spreading -- another way China fumbled its early response to the virus. Earlier reporting showed how top Chinese leaders delayed warning the public and withheld information from the World Health Organization, supplying the most comprehensive picture yet of China's initial missteps. Taken together, these mistakes in January facilitated the virus's spread through Wuhan and across the world undetected, in a pandemic that has now sickened more than 64 million people and killed almost 1.5 million.