Taiwan has said that the World Health Organisation (WHO) had ignored its alert in early December about human-to-human transmission of coronavirus which has now claimed thousands of lives around the world.
The virus that originated in China is highly contagious. WHO apparently ignored Taiwan's alert, subsequently slowing down the response to the pandemic, according to Financial Times.
WHO has also faced backlash for praising China's handling of the coronavirus pandemic despite several accusations of initial cover-up, which also included threatening of whistle-blowers with arrest for talking about the pandemic.
Health officials in Taipei said they alerted the WHO at the end of December about the risk of human-to-human transmission of the new virus but said its concerns were not passed on to other countries, FT said.
Taipei government officials told the Financial Times that their warning was not shared with other countries.
China's health ministry confirmed human-to-human transmission of the novel virus on January 20, after the WHO said there could be "limited" human transmission cases, but backtracked on the view on the same day.
The reason why WHO apparently ignored Taiwan's alert which could have saved thousands of lives has a political background and China's relations with Taiwan.
Taiwan is not a part of the WHO because China claims it as part of its territory and does not want it treated as an independent state.
The FT report, quoting WHO's Dr Bruce Aylward, who led the team to China's Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, said there was a "huge back and forth" with Chinese officials about what went in the report.
Dr Aylward added that Chinese also refused to include any reference to avoiding a "second wave" of coronavirus in the report.
According to worldometer.com, there are a total of 494,465 active cases of coronavirus worldwide and at least 31,045 deaths.?
The latest epicentre of the deadly pandemic is the US, which now has more than 115,000 cases and over 2,000 deaths.