"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed — after the event: that was what counted — concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds." - George Orwell, 1984

A debate was engaged in on Reddit whereby the World Bank's World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) OVERWROTE THEIR OWN DATABASE on a Sunday afternoon completely against protocol. This video demonstrates this censorship event and the links below provide the other relevant sources.

This is the link to the original Reddit, that is unavailable publicly as the post, its creator, and my own comments have all been deleted. https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/infq57/can_someone_please_explain_why_the_reports_for/

I post here the original post on Reddit, which was removed.

Yes database administrators are lazy agreed. But this goes against strict protocol. If you go read their past nomenclature documents you will see that this is not standard practice to rename in this fashion. Usually if there are new items, new subheadings are created for those items. For example the HS code 382200 did not existed before they created modified it this year. So why would it encompass items that were sold last year or the year before under a different code when it is a completely new product? It does not seem to follow their standard nomenclature procedures. Look back at past nomenclature changes, this is not a standard practice. http://www.wcoomd.org/-/media/wco/public/global/pdf/topics/nomenclature/instruments-and-tools/hs-nomenclature-2017/2016/table_i_trp1712_en_rev1.pdf?db=web

Finally, why would the World Bank be this lazy about something? Speaking as a programmer, this is a simple fix not requiring OVERWRITING your previous years' databases! This does not seem like a mistake to me.

A few hours later...

Apparently they do like to OVERWRITE data.

The link now shows the title as "Medical Test kits" instead of "COVID-19 Test kits". There was no announcement today about the change as some people in this thread have suggested happened previously:

Annoucement Page: http://www.wcoomd.org/en/media/newsroom/2020.aspx

So, someone just made a drastic change in a worldwide database on a Sunday afternoon against the regulations of their own "HS classification reference for Covid-19 medical supplies 3.0 Edition", which says this 3822.00 should be named as "COVID-19 Test kits", with zero announcements to the effect.

This leads to a few obvious questions:

Why did they change the Description for HS 3822.00 against their own regulations?

Why did they not make an announcement to the public prior as in they have in the past?

Why did they claim these products needed to be specially listed as COVID-19 in "support of trade facilitation during the COVID-19 pandemic" and now they are simply listed as generic "Medical Test kits"?

If we really are in an unprecedented pandemic, wouldn't it be wise to classify the COVID-19 PCR test separtely from other PCR tests so we have data for the future on how many were traded during this time?

Wouldn't the COVID-19 PCR tests benefit from a particular HS code so they can easily pass through customs as the WCO is claiming? If it would be beneficial for future data collection, why lump them in with all the other PCR tests that imported/exported yearly?