The committee, acting under the WHO’s International Health Regulations, also declined to endorse international travel restrictions, which would have slowed the spread of the virus. The experts said those guidelines need to be changed.

Governments, meanwhile, failed to grasp that the emergency declaration was WHO’s “loudest possible alarm,” the experts said.

“It is glaringly obvious to the Panel that February 2020 was a lost month, when steps could and should have been taken to curtail the epidemic and forestall the pandemic.”

Instead of preparing their hospitals for COVID-19 patients, many countries engaged in a “winner takes all” scramble for protective equipment and medicines, it said.

The panel did not lay specific blame on China for its actions in the early days of the pandemic, or on WHO head Tedros, accused by the United States under then-President Donald Trump of being too deferential to Beijing.

Lawrence Gostin of the O’Neill Institute for national and global health law at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C., called the failure to point fingers a weakness of the report.

“The report does not single out any government, agency, or actor for their actions or inactions in impeding the response —hurting the ability of WHO to adapt for the future,” he said.

“In particular, despite marked delays in China’s reporting of a novel outbreak in Wuhan and its impeding WHO in finding the pandemic’s origins, the (panel) did not seek to hold the government accountable.”