Coronavirus: China 'squandering opportunity' by providing world with faulty virus testing equipment

The Chinese government is scrambling to rebuild confidence in the medical equipment it is providing to the rest of the world to help stem the coronavirus pandemic.

With its own numbers of new Covid-19 infections seemingly under control, China has been encouraging its companies to keep producing equipment that it can gift or sell back to Western countries - in many cases returning favours done to them at the start of the outbreak.

But several European countries have rejected batches of test kits and facemasks made in China, amounting to millions of items of equipment, on the basis that they do not work as advertised.

The UK has reportedly already paid for two million antibody tests from China that are due to arrive in the coming week. Yet according to ITV News’ Robert Peston, Public Health England has been hesitant to give the tests its seal of approval “for reasons that are extremely unclear”.

Last week, the Spanish government said it had ordered 640,000 antigen tests from China, which detect whether a patient is currently infected with the virus, and therefore if they can pass it on to others.

Spain said checks on the first shipment of tests, bought from Chinese diagnostics firm Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology, found they displayed “insufficient sensibility” for the virus - an accurate detection rate of about 30 per cent, when at least 80 per cent is required.

The Czech Republic has also criticised hundreds of thousands of such tests acquired from China, saying they only worked if a person had been infected for at least five days, even as it pushed to up its testing capacity to 10,000 a day.

And Slovakia’s prime minister Igor Matovic said that its 1.2 million tests - bought from China through local middlemen - were so inaccurate they should “just be thrown straight into the Danube”.

In some cases, China has countered the growing narrative around its faulty equipment through traditional propaganda methods, shifting the blame onto the end-user countries.

Thus, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry said that the preliminary conclusion from the Chinese consulate in Slovakia was that the inaccuracies were the result of medical workers using the kits incorrectly.

At the same time, Chinese officials have issued a statement saying that Beijing is increasing the checks exporters must undergo before they will be given licences to sell such equipment abroad - an implicit acceptance that standards may not have been high enough.

Previously, some Chinese manufacturers had taken advantage of easier EU regulations to get their products into the market before they had been approved at home.

In a current transition period between two regulatory systems, companies have been able to get a CE mark, meaning their products are approved for sale across European countries, simply by submitting a dossier of documents, avoiding stricter clinical tests or third-party assessments.

In practice, it has meant manufacturers are able to export equipment that would not meet the standards of China’s own regulatory body.

From now on, Beijing said, Chinese exporters must now obtain a domestic certificate from the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) before they will be granted an export licence.

Steve Tsang, director of SOAS’s China Institute, questioned whether China was knowingly trying to pass off the substandard equipment as returning in kind the support it received when the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan.

“[Displaying] the industrial capacity of China, even in a lockdown situation being able to so quickly produce supplies which then are being used to enable the rest of the world to cope, would have gone down very, very well.

“If they had been honest, saying they had received that much as donations and we are now returning that donation, plus all these additional [commercial] services, people would have been saying ‘wow, China is great!’ It is not going down quite so well because of the way that they are managing it. They are squandering the opportunity to show their soft power.”

Mr Tsang said it was also possible that China was not applying double standards - “that the poor level of quality applies both to domestic and external supplies, in which case it would suggest the Chinese official statistics are unreliable because the testing kits are unreliable”.

“The alternative is that they have kept the good, high quality reliable kits for themselves, and they provided trash ones for export,” he said. “Which is worse? I don't know.”