One year after the Wuhan lockdown, the WHO mission tries to unravel the mysteries of the coronavirus | Coronavirus

A year ago, the 11 million inhabitants of the Chinese city of Wuhan and other nearby cities were being strictly confined because of a new virus about which little was known. Only one market was suspected of selling shellfish and live animals, some of them wild. One of them could have been the source of the virus that made so many sick and killed so many people. A year later, there is an international mission of scientists in Wuhan, sent by the World Health Organization (WHO), to try to discover the origin of the virus. But we are only at the beginning of the investigation.

Rather than wandering around the city of Wuhan as detectives looking for clues, the WHO scientists will base their work primarily on what Chinese researchers have done over the past year: they will have access to studies and samples that are broadcast in the West. for example. It sounds strange: it may be the effect of watching too many Hollywood series and movies, but researchers would not be expected to stalk the market, look for places where man and nature collide in ways dangerous to everyone’s health, visit the Wuhan Institute Virology Department, where are bat coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2?

“The way to investigate the origin of the virus was negotiated between China and the WHO, so it became natural that the investigation had to be based on the work carried out by Chinese scientists,” Yanzhong Huang, an analyst from think tank American Council on Foreign Relations, and specialist in China and global health.

Transparency

“On the one hand, China is a member state of the WHO and this United Nations agency has no power to carry out an independent investigation in a country, without the authorization of the authorities. And secondly, Chinese scientists have already done a lot of research on the origin of the virus over the past year, although that research has to be approved, sanctioned by the Government, “he adds.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there were Chinese scientists who very quickly shared the information they could determine about the virus that was causing a worrisome outbreak in Wuhan, such as virologist Zhang Yongzhen, from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, who in Posted on 11 from January online the SARS-CoV-2 genome, just eight days after receiving the samples.

But an Associated Press investigation, published in the final days of 2020, shows that since then, the Chinese government has imposed strict control on scientists. It did not repress the investigation of the new coronavirus, but both authorization to do so and publication must go through a new office under President Xi Jinping, says the AP, which benefited from a leak of official documents.

“The transparency of research in China is indeed a problem, but that is why this WHO mission is useful. It gives the international scientific community the opportunity to know what has been done there, what conclusions Chinese scientists have reached, what they already know, in fact, about the new coronavirus, and what remains to be done, ”commented Yanzhong. Huang. “This exchange of information will allow us to uncover more clues about the animal origin of the disease.”

Because that is the main mystery: what is the natural host of the coronavirus that is causing so much suffering to the human population (horseshoe bats are suspected) and if there was, probably, there was an intermediate animal, more similar to man, where the virus it adapted (the pangolin, which was under suspicion, was more or less discarded), undergoing mutations that allowed it to infect humans and become extremely contagious.

But this mission should be just the beginning of that investigation. WHO scientists will have little time to do research. They arrived in Wuhan on January 14 and are to remain in quarantine for two weeks. Only in the next 15 days can they go to the field. And they will leave China at the time of the Lunar New Year (February 12), when millions of Chinese have vacations and travel, to reunite with their families.

When fighting to contain an infectious disease, a virus that is transmitted through aerosols, this great annual migration in China, as some authors call it, is a huge nightmare. Perhaps that is why there have been so many problems with the granting of visas to some of the scientists on the mission. “I’m sure the WHO discussed the schedule with the Chinese government, but there seems to have been some coordination problems. This suggests that China was not very excited about the prospect of receiving the WHO mission at this time, ”commented Yanzhong Huang.

The weight of the narrative

Among the obstacles that WHO scientists will face is the narrative imposed by the Chinese state about the origin of the pandemic. There has been little news on media on the mission, only on visa problems, which led the WHO to criticize Beijing’s attitude, and served to spread a distorted message. “The Xinhua news agency reported, but said that this scientific mission would be part of a global investigation in several countries on the origin of the virus, that other countries would soon follow China,” explained the analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In a politically polarized climate, from the start, with Trump’s America wanting to blame the pandemic, the “Chinese” virus, remember? – in China the reverse of the medal occurs, trying to show that SARS-CoV-2 may have appeared in another country. In India, for example, or even in Italy, where some studies seem to have detected it already in autumn 2019. Or in frozen food imports: only in China are there reports that the virus was detected in frozen fish imported from Europe, for example .Example.

“There are all kinds of conspiracy theories, rumors. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs speaks of ‘multiple outbreaks’ since the beginning of the pandemic. This has become part of the official narrative about the origin of the virus, ”stresses Yanzhong Huang.

“The official narrative can be found in the white paper that the Beijing government published on how China handled the pandemic. Basically, it portrays a country that was effective and cooperative in dealing with the pandemic. Initial mismanagement is omitted, at the local and national level, ”emphasizes the China and global health expert. But curiously, the independent group created by the WHO to assess the response to the emergence of covid-19, which issued the first report this week, criticizes the response of the Chinese authorities. “Opportunities to implement basic public health measures have been missed,” says the group’s document, led by former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Although at the time of the Wuhan lockdown there were complaints and an unprecedented climate of challenge, the average Chinese citizen accepts this narrative: “Most people agree that the government acted on time, was effective and that its action should be seen as a model all countries to follow. They also accept the government’s theories about the origin of the pandemic, ”he says.

“There is a kind of cognitive discrepancy between the Western world and China on the Chinese management of the pandemic,” concluded Yanzhong Huang, although he notes that the performance of the Chinese state in the West is viewed with some ambivalence: “It is a mixture of admiration and criticism”, for having controlled the contagion, but for having done it in a way that Westerners do not agree.