The lead agency for monitoring and controlling the spread of infectious diseases in Europe was hampered by a catalogue of problems when the coronavirus pandemic struck, according to an investigation by the EU Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) struggled in the early weeks of the crisis due to a lack of resources, poor data from member states, and incomplete information from China, where the pandemic originated, according to the report published this morning.
Ms O'Reilly found that the ECDC was over-reliant on patchy data coming from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control (CDC), which in January of 2020 was playing down the severity of the virus and the extent of human-to-human