From the article:
“…The Chinese government is authoritarian, which helps explain its crackdown on embarrassing information from the start. But another important reason, experts say, is that China wants to be perceived as a stable world power. That’s hard to accomplish when new diseases keep originating in the country, like SARS did in 2003. To safeguard its global prestige, then, Xi and his underlings worked to keep news of the brewing crisis under wraps.
‘There were definitely public image reasons why China did what it did,’ Amanda Glassman, a health expert at the Center for Global Development, told me.
But while China may have been the first country to prioritize politics over public health in this pandemic, it wouldn’t be the last. Spain, and particularly Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, had a tough choice to make. It was only in January that he formed a minority left-wing government, giving him a tenuous hold on power and making him one of the nation’s most historically weak leaders. Any move that might anger the population, especially his left-wing base, could see him lose control…”
