Unveiling : China & Covid-19

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The “Chinese” virus, 192 days of catastrophe…and counting.

The first corona virus case came on December 31, 2019 from the city of Wuhan, China. Surprisingly, Wuhan was one of the first cities that was declared “corona free”. A lot of people believe that China is responsible for the spread of this virus. Even American president Donald Trump has been constantly blaming China for the same and he has also shown signs of holding a serious investigation regarding the root cause of the spread of this virus.

On the other hand, China insists it has been fully transparent and hidden nothing on the killer Corona virus disease (Covid-19), whose spread has now turned into a nightmare for the whole world resulting into 12.2 million people being affected and 557K people lost their lives and the numbers are increasing as you read this. The economies all around the world are crumbling down and people have no idea how to deal with the upcoming economical crisis. But still, Beijing is opposing an independent international inquiry into the origins and spread of the virus.

Investigating the genesis of the pandemic is critical for another reason – this is not the first deadly disease to spread globally from China. A Chinese cover up of the 2002-03 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak triggered the world’s first 21st-century pandemic. The world has an unpleasant flashback to 2003 when for weeks Beijing would lie and hide the full extent of the SARS epidemic. Getting to the bottom of how the latest pathogen flared up and spread is essential for designing rapid-response efforts to prevent a future outbreak from spiraling into yet another pandemic.

Economic Times says,
Beijing, however, has shied away from answering even basic questions. For example, why did China stop flights from Wuhan to the rest of the country after the covid-19 outbreak, yet allowed international flights to operate from Wuhan, thus facilitating the global spread of the virus? Why did it clamp down recently on further research by Chinese scientists into the origins of the virus? It instituted a new policy mandating prior vetting after several Chinese research papers highlighted dangerous work on bat corona viruses, with one study concluding that “the killer corona virus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan”.

According to The Hindu,
A Shanghai laboratory was also shut down by the authorities after its publication of the corona virus genome opened the global path to diagnostic tests. China also refused to share any live virus sample with the world, “making it impossible to track the disease’s evolution,” to quote US Secretary of state Mike Pompeo. The dangerous lab research in Wuhan may explain why China, instead of sharing any corona virus sample destroyed its lab samples.

Usually it takes years to decrypt genome of virus but China did it very early. (Virus Genome Sequencing)
The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world’s most dangerous pathogens (Inside Wuhan Institute of virology)

Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has been questioned repeatedly for its deference to Beijing since December helping China to cover its tracks. Several countries now want an inquiry to focus on the roles of both China and WHO. US president Donald trump has offered China an incentive of cooperation by contrasting a mistake with willful action: “If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, I mean, then sure there should be consequences.” He has also questioned WHO’s involvement in this issue and also halted the funding to the organization, in the middle of the global pandemic.

A 53-year-old fitness trainer died on Wednesday after checking into a hospital in Wuhan a little more than a week earlier, said his niece. His family had expected the death certificate to reflect the deadly coronavirus, because as his condition deteriorated, his doctors told his family he was suffering from an untreatable virus in his lungs.

Instead, it recorded “severe pneumonia” as the cause of death, she said. The relatives of two other people who died in separate hospitals in Wuhan this week also described similar situations, saying the causes of death had been given as “viral pneumonia.”
How China is hiding the true number of corona virus deaths. “There are likely to be many times more cases in Wuhan than officially confirmed,” said Neil Ferguson, a disease modular at Imperial College London. Not only this, surprisingly, 21 million mobile accounts and 840k landlines were vanished in the past 3 months from China, the most Smartphone dependent country in the world (there are around 1.6 billion registered mobile accounts for an adult population of 1.1 billion). Although there are various other plausible reasons like declination in number of “water army” as mentioned in the link.

Just think — if China was not guilty of any cover-up, wouldn’t it be welcoming the growing international calls for an independent inquiry and offering to assist in such a probe? This would give China a chance to clear the air with the rest of the world.
Instead, Beijing seems to be showcasing its guilt by belligerently rejecting the pleas for such an inquiry and threatening economic reprisals.

Australia is more economically tied with China than with its security patron, the US. Yet it has come under a blistering attack from China for proposing that WHO member-nations support an independent inquiry into the origins and spread of the corona virus. Australia said it will push for such an investigation at the WHO assembly when it convenes for its annual meeting which was held on May 17, 2020. In response, the Chinese ambassador to Australia threatened punishment through Chinese boycotts of Australian wine, beef and tourism and education sectors. The annual meeting took place in Geneva where 62 countries backed a joint Australian and European Union push for an independent inquiry into the corona virus outbreak.
Meanwhile, as the Group of Seven (G7) countries, India and others seek a review and reform of WHO, China’s decision to give an additional $30 million to the agency appears aimed at frustrating such calls. International rules require countries to notify WHO of “a public health emergency of international concern within 24 hours of assessment”. China’s failure to do so has led to calls for introducing WHO inspectors with the power to enter a country to probe a disease outbreak in the manner of weapons inspectors. Make no mistake: Money alone can neither aid China’s strategy to deflect blame for the current crisis nor help defuse the increasing global backlash against it. Calls are growing louder across the world to hold China publicly accountable for the pandemic’s mounting human and economic toll. The only way China can silence such calls and begin to repair the serious damage to its image is through an independent international inquiry.
If it blocks such a probe, China will pay enormous costs — not as reparations but by compelling other major economies to restructure their relationships with it, a process that could ultimately end its status as the global hub of vital supply chains. China’s mercantilist expansionism has already led to new regulations in the European Union, Australia, Germany, Spain and Italy. But India’s recent new rule mandating prior scrutiny of Chinese investment in any form is the first of its kind. Another major recent move is by Japan, which has earmarked $2.2 billion to help Japanese firms shift manufacturing out of China.
If China refuses to come clean, important countries are likely to start economically distancing themselves from it, through new tariffs, non-tariff barriers, relocation of manufacturing and other policy moves. Eventually, this could undermine the communist party’s monopoly on power in China.

All these things we just read about are just a tip of the iceberg. The way China has been responding to all these allegations just raise more and more questions and theories about the real reason behind the spread of this virus. Lockdowns, restrictions, covered faces and “social-distancing” is the new normal. Unless a vaccine comes out for this disease, we have to adapt living in these conditions. If we take history into account, the fastest vaccine developed till now is of Mumps disease which took 4 years. Even if we keep a very optimistic approach, a vaccine for Covid-19 is not coming anytime in this year. People have now become both careful and careless at the same time. They are wearing masks but the social distancing norms are being flouted all round the country. Now is the time to be the most careful, not only for ourselves but also for the people we live with, and just for the record, while you read this, the death toll has increased.