When China faced the coronavirus outbreak, Italy and other countries sent out medical equipment for free so the country could tackle the problem, however China is not doing the same thing for countries that helped them during the outbreak.
Italy donated Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) to China during the outbreak, and now Italy is in need of help, however, China wants to sell the Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) to Italy.
The COVID-19, which originated from Wuhan, China, reached Italy, who is now the epicenter of the virus in Europe.
With over 128,000 cases in the country, Italy is in dire help.
China initially said that they will be donating Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) to Italy, however, reports later revealed that Beijing had sold the PPE to Italy.
A Trump administration official said China forced Italy to buy back the PPE supply that was donated to them during the initial coronavirus outbreak.
The official explained:
“Before the virus hit Europe, Italy sent tons of PPE to China to help China protect its own population. China then has sent Italian PPE back to Italy — some of it, not even all of it … and charged them for it.”
Another thing with the testing kits that China is selling to other countries is that they are turning out to be defective.
This fact has slowed down the testing phase of countries that are seeing massive cases of the coronavirus.
As a matter of fact, Spain was forced to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering that they were faulty.
When asked, China said the defective materials were not defective and ended up blaming others.
China said countries were not “double-checking” the instructions that were listed on the masks.
However, the Netherlands complained that half of the masks they were sent did not meet safety standards.
The senior official from the Trump Administration added:
“It’s so disingenuous for Chinese officials now to say we are the ones who are helping the Italians or we are the ones who are helping the developing world when, in fact, they are the ones who infected all of us. Of course they should be helping. They have a special responsibility to help because they are the ones who began the spread of the coronavirus and did not give the information required to the rest of the world to plan accordingly.”
As of writing this article, there are 1,278,654 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus all over the world.
The deadly disease has killed 69,758 people.
Outside China, the United States of America is the worst-hit country with having 336,851 confirmed cases of the virus.
Spain, who is the second on the spot, has 131,646 cases followed by Italy, who has 128,948 cases of the coronavirus.