China selling, donating defective items in rush to profit from Covid-19 pandemic

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Thousands of testing kits and medical masks were below standard or defective.

(TibetanReview.net, Mar30’20) – A number of countries have rejected China’s sale or donation of equipment designed to combat the novel coronavirus outbreak. Thousands of testing kits and medical masks were below standard or defective, reported bbc.com Mar 30, citing authorities in Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands.

India said it was looking to procure Personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators from China but testing kits from other countries given recent cases of faulty equipment sent by it to various countries, reported indiatoday.in Mar 30. Obviously India has not heard yet that China-made medical masks too had been found defective.

The bbc.com report cited the Dutch health ministry as announcing Mar 28 that it had recalled 600,000 face masks. The equipment had arrived from a Chinese manufacturer on Mar 21 and had already been distributed to front-line medical teams, the report said.

It cited Dutch officials as saying the masks did not fit and their filters did not work as intended, even though they had a quality certificate.

“The rest of the shipment was immediately put on hold and has not been distributed,” a statement was quoted as reading. “Now it has been decided not to use any of this shipment.”

Spain was also reported to have announced that it had bought hundreds of thousands of testing kits from China to combat the virus, but revealed in the following days that nearly 60,000 could not accurately determine if a patient had the virus.

Turkey was also reported to have announced that it had found some testing kits ordered from Chinese companies not sufficiently accurate while some 350,000 of the tests had worked well.

Reports about donations or sales by China of equipment for combating Covid-19 pandemic to a number of other countries including in Asia, have also surfaced in recent days.

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