This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
> "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," the organization had said.
That was on January 14, 2020. China almost certainly had evidence of human-to-human transmission by then.
EDIT: Taiwan alerted the WHO of human-to-human transmission on December 31, 2019. So please, stop spreading misinformation about the WHO. The WHO dropped the ball, and it's being badly. Until there is a change in management at the WHO, everything they say has to be examined extra carefully.
