Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic – The New Yorker
October 6, 2020
McDonalds, Mulizwa said.
Not me, Sow said. I want to get some steak. Maybe some chicken. Something grilled.
I said something to the effect that the worst was behind them, and Sow grinned. Were still living, he said.
Wuhan memories remained fresh, and the materials of documentation were also close at hand. People sometimes handed over manuscripts, and they took out their phones and pulled up photographs and messages from January and February. But I wondered how much of this material would dissipate over time.
In town, I met two Chinese journalists in their twenties who were visiting from out of town. They had been posted during the period of the sealed city: back then, anybody sent to cover events in Wuhan had to stay for the long haul. One was a director of streaming media whom Ill call Han, and he had found that government-run outlets generally wanted footage that emphasized the victory over the disease, not the suffering of Wuhan residents. Han hoped that eventually hed find other ways to use the material. It will be in the hard drive, he said, tapping his camera.
The other journalist, a print reporter Ill call Yin, reminisced about the unusual freedom the press had been granted for a brief period in January. Journalists reported on whistle-blower figures like Li Wenliang, and they exposed some early missteps, like a failure by the Red Cross to distribute critical medical equipment. Such problems were quickly fixed, and Yin felt glad to be of service to society. I could see what it means to be the fourth estate, she said. But, in February, as the government started to get control of the pandemic, it also tightened restrictions on the press. A friend of mine said that it was a very short spring, Yin said.
After that, Yin reported on a number of issues that couldnt be published or completed, and she often talked with scientists and officials who didnt want to say too much. One person said, Ten years later, if the climate has changed, Ill tell you my story, Yin told me. He knew that he would be judged by history. She continued, These people are inside the system, but they also know that they are inside history.
Yin described an interview with an employee at a research institution who was so upset that he began to weep. He wouldnt answer her questions, but he said that he had been keeping a detailed diary. She hoped that someday such materials would be released.
I suspect that this will eventually happen, because nowadays there are so many ways to preserve information. In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemica period of isolation is crucial. Throughout the Communist era, there have been many moments of quarantined history: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In every case, an initial silencing has been followed by sporadic outbreaks of leaked information. Wuhan will eventually follow the same pattern, but for the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city.
When I spoke with scientists outside China, they werent focussed on the governments early missteps. I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics, Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me, in a phone conversation. According to her, its unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped this particular virus at its source. Ive always believed that this thing was going to spread, she said.
Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, pointed out that Chinese scientists had quickly sequenced the viruss genome, which was made available to researchers worldwide on January 11th. I honestly think that they had a horrific situation in Wuhan and they were able to contain it, she said. There were mistakes early on, but they did act, and they shared fast.
For much of El-Sadrs career, she has worked on issues related to AIDS in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. After years of research, scientists eventually came to the consensus that H.I.V. most likely started through the bushmeat tradethe first human was probably infected after coming into contact with a primate or primate meat. El-Sadr views the coronavirus as another inevitable outcome of peoples encroachment on the natural world. We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the H.I.V. and the COVID pandemics, she wrote to me, in an e-mail. Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.
Theres a tendency to believe that we would know the source of the coronavirus if the Chinese had been more forthcoming, or if they hadnt cleaned out the Huanan market before stalls and animals could be studied properly. But Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years on research on bat coronaviruses, told me that its typical to fail to gather good data from the site of an initial outbreak. Once people get sick, local authorities inevitably focus on the public-health emergency. You send in the human doctors, not the veterinarians, he said, in a phone conversation. And the doctors response is to clean out the market. They want to stop the infections.
Daszak believes the virus probably circulated for weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, and he doubts that the city was the source. There are bats in Wuhan, but it was the wrong time of year, he told me. It was winter, and bats are not out as much. His research has indicated that, across Southeast Asia, more than a million people each year are infected by bat coronaviruses. Some individuals trap, deal, or raise animals that might serve as intermediary hosts. But generally its people who live near bat caves, Daszak said. Every night, the bats fly out, and they urinate and defecate. Some might get on a surface, or on somebodys clothes, and then they touch their mouths or noses.
Daszak said that he had always thought that such an outbreak was most likely to occur in Kunming or Guangzhou, southern cities that are close to many bat caves and that also have an intensive wildlife trade. He thinks that Chinese scientists are probably now searching hospital freezers for lab samples of people who died of pneumonia shortly before the outbreak. You would take those samples and look for the virus, he said. Theyll find something eventually. These things just dont happen overnight; it requires a lot of work. Weve seen this repeatedly with every disease. It turns out that it was already trickling through the population.
Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in New York. EcoHealth has become the target of conspiracy theorists, including some who claim that the virus was man-made. Daszak and many prominent virologists say that anything created in a lab would show clear signs of manipulation. Theres also speculation that the outbreak started when researchers accidentally released a coronavirus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But theres no evidence of a leak, or even that the institute has ever studied a virus that could cause a COVID-19 outbreak.
Scientists in China are under incredible pressure to publish, Daszak said. It really drives openness and transparency. He has spent a good deal of time in Wuhan, and co-authored more than a dozen papers with Chinese colleagues. If we had found a virus that infected human cells and spread within a cell culture, we would have put the information out there, he said. In sixteen years, Ive never come across the slightest hint of subterfuge. Theyve never hidden data. Ive never had a situation where one lab person tells me one thing and the other says something else. If you were doing things that you didnt want people to know about, why would you invite foreigners into the lab?
In April, President Trump told reporters that the U.S. should stop funding research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shortly after Trumps comments, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $3.7-million grant to EcoHealth, which had been studying how bat coronaviruses are transmitted to people. EcoHealth has appealed the decision, but Daszak doesnt expect a change unless theres a new Administration.
I asked Daszak why, if he has such faith in the openness of his Wuhan colleagues, the Chinese government has been so closed about other aspects of the outbreak. He said that science is one thing, and politics something else; he thinks that officials were embarrassed about the early mistakes, and in response they simply shut down all information. Youre a journalist in China, he said. I dont know what you would say about the Chinese idea of P.R., but Id say theyre pretty terrible.
One afternoon, I drove past Huoshenshan, the newly constructed emergency hospital. The site was cordoned off; people told me that the hospital had remained vacant in case the virus returns. But this seems unlikely, and Wuhan, like the rest of China, is looking to the next stage of the pandemic. At the beginning of July, China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceutical company called Sinopharm, completed construction of a vaccine-manufacturing plant in Wuhan. The project began while the city was still sealed. Thats the politically correct thing to do, a Shanghai-based biotech entrepreneur told me. To show the world that the heroic people of Wuhan have come back.
The plant has the capacity to produce more than a hundred million vaccine doses a year. Another C.N.B.G. factory, in Beijing, can make an additional hundred million doses a year of a different version of the vaccine. Both plants are already producing and stockpiling the vaccines, which have almost completed Phase III trials. Because China essentially has no active pandemic, C.N.B.G. had to go far afield in order to find subjects. Currently, researchers have enrolled more than fifty thousand people in the United Arab Emirates, Peru, and other countries in South America and the Middle East.
Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, told me that the C.N.B.G. vaccine has already been given to a number of Chinese government officials, under an emergency-use approval granted by the authorities. I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine, he said, in a phone conversation. He thought that the total number was probably around a hundred. Its middle-level officials, he said. Vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.
Pharmaceutical executives have also been expected to lead the way, like the construction manager who donned P.P.E. in order to escort his workers into the patient ward. Every senior executive at Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated, He said. Including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-presidenteveryone. The Chinese press has reported that vaccinations have also been administered to hundreds of thousands of citizens in high-risk areas around the world. (C.N.B.G. did not respond to a request for comment.)
In the West, Chinas image has been badly damaged by the pandemic and by other recent events. The country has tightened political crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and, in May, after Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, China responded furiously, placing new tariffs and restrictions on Australian goods ranging from barley to beef. But He believes that the situation is fluid. All of these feelings can turn around quickly, he told me. I think that once China has a vaccine, and if they can help other countries, it can make a huge difference.
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Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New Yorker
