Taiwan didn't even have a confirmed case until January 21. They couldn't possibly have reported anything but unconfirmed rumors from China. WHO warned about human-to-human transmission as soon as it was confirmed by Chinese scientists.
The US cutting funding is obviously a political move in order to shift blame away from the utterly incompetent government.
From the article it should be clear that the observers were there to learn from their Chinese colleagues, not to conduct independent research on human-to-human transmission.
> From the article it should be clear that the observers were there to learn from their Chinese colleagues, not to conduct independent research on human-to-human transmission.
The Taiwanese experts saw clusters of disease, such as a wife who got sick a few days after her husband, but did not visit the wet market personally. This was an indication of human-to-human transmission. Not quite the "unconfirmed rumors from China", as you put it.
EDIT: disregard, I got the dates mixed up. Original included below for transparency's sake.
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And particularly-damningly, the WHO then turned around and claimed on 14 January¹ that there was "no evidence" of human-to-human transmission even though said evidence was right there in front of them.
WHO never claimed this, they (correctly) cited what Chinese authorities were saying. Here is the full text of the tweet for people that don't like reading images of text:
> Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.
Also note that the WHO field visit to Wuhan took place a week later, on 20-21 January. In their mission summary from 22 January they wrote [1]:
> Data collected through detailed epidemiological investigation and through the deployment of the new test kit nationally suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan. More analysis of the epidemiological data is needed to understand the full extent of human-to-human transmission. WHO stands ready to provide support to China to conduct further detailed analysis.
The US cutting funding is obviously a political move in order to shift blame away from the utterly incompetent government.