In a report released today, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response—a body established last year by the WHO’s director-general to identify lessons from the present pandemic and apply them to avert future ones—arrives at a stark conclusion. Drawing on a detailed chronological reconstruction of the pandemic, it finds that February 2020 stands out as “a lost month, when steps could and should have been taken to curtail the epidemic and forestall the pandemic.” Had that month not been squandered, by a world “lulled into complacency” by the lack of a catastrophic pandemic in more than a century, “we believe we wouldn’t be looking at an accelerating pandemic,” former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, one of the panel’s co-chairs, told me and other journalists in a briefing on the report... The panel concluded, for example, that the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China probably fulfilled the conditions to be declared a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, at least as early as the first meeting of the WHO’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on COVID-19, on January 22, 2020. But the divided committee didn’t make the declaration until a week later—a crucial delay in the early stages of a potential pandemic—when there were already 98 cases in 18 countries outside China. Clark noted that “if travel restrictions had been imposed more quickly, more widely … that would have been a serious inhibition on the rapid transmission” of COVID-19. But when the emergency committee declared the PHEIC on January 30, it did not recommend travel or trade restrictions. The WHO’s approach was guided by the International Health Regulations, which aim to “avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.”