China’s authoritarian regime severely curtails many of the fundamental freedoms which citizens in democracies take for granted. In the two months following the detection of the first case of COVID-19, Chinese Communist Party Officials refused to listen to medical experts, punished those who shared information about the novel virus and censored media coverage. IAD’s Founder & Public Affairs Manager argues: if China were a democracy, a political system in which freedom of expression and freedom of the press is indispensable, it could have been possible to contain the COVID-19 outbreak at an early stage.