June 22, 2020
From the date of the initial outbreak
in Wuhan I watched carefully on a daily basis the dispersion and progression of
the coronavirus in China and then abroad, collecting as much data as were
available on each location. By late May of 2020, China had been infection-free
for many weeks, the concern turning to the identification and quarantine of
imported cases. At the same time, the US became once again 'the leader of the world', this time in virus infections and deaths, producing 20,000 to 30,000 new cases and around 1,000 deaths per day. At the time, American hostility toward China's success in stopping the virus was palpable, with many nasty
media articles and White House accusations about China's false statistics and
blaming China for "spreading the virus" to the US. CNN stated,
"Chinese state media has repeatedly touted China's effective measures in
containing the virus as the number of infections and deaths surged abroad,
contrasting its success with the failures of Western governments, especially
the United States." (1) Clearly there was much surprise and bitterness at
China's success and America's failure, this coated in a sticky layer of
resentment based partly on a justified suspicion that the Chinese were not
overly distressed at the Americans enjoying the fruits of their own labor.
But even then I had a sense of an
apparition, a version of Dickens' 'ghost of coronavirus past', accompanied by
an uncomfortable feeling the Americans were sufficiently bitter (and vicious)
to deny the Chinese their apparently easy victory. My fear was that the
Americans would try to reseed China as they did Russia, and it would seem my
fears were not unjustified. The new virus that broke out at the Xinfadi market
in Beijing was a different strain than any previously existing in China, one
that existed only in the US and Europe and could only have been brought in from
the outside. And once again at a seafood market with no identifiable patient
zero, no clear epidemiology (source and distribution) of a virus that did not exist
in China. It almost had to be deliberately seeded, the odds against being
infinitesimally small.
