Other great stories tonight: Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan retire from the royal family; the air pollution of Iran; and the story of Iran’s weapons capability.
The beginning of this pandemic was a fiasco of misinformation, a perfect example of the war fog surrounding the outbreaks of new pathogens. It was a mixture of panicked confusion in Wuhan hospitals, lies from local health officials and misguided shots by health agencies, viral experts and journalists, myself included.
The January 8 story was the second The Times did about the virus. The first, on January 6, describes China struggling with a mysterious pneumonia that, according to local health officials, has admitted several dozen people to the hospital linked to a local seafood and meat market. It did not kill anyone and apparently did not spread from person to person, Wuhan health officials said. Here in the United States, this has led to much speculation: that it was the return of SARS in a lighter form; that it was contaminated fumes, which killed American teenagers at the time, that China’s raging epidemic of African swine fever may have spread to humans. Last year’s flu season was also getting ugly, and flus is causing a lot of pneumonia.
The news pin on January 8 was that Chinese state media said that unnamed local scientists had concluded that the mysterious pneumonia was caused by a previously unknown coronavirus. I submitted some background paragraphs to Sui-Lee, including the information that there were no deaths and that there were no human-to-human transmission. She asks why I think so. I am sending the US CDC’s latest travel warning for China, which was issued on January 6 and was only a Level 1 using a normal precaution. ‘It is said that there were 59 cases without deaths and “no reports of person – to – person or health workers’ distribution.”
In retrospect, neither Sui-Lee, I nor the CDC or the World Health Organization knew then that Wuhan’s politically ambitious mayor had ordered a cover-up on 31 December. He closed the market and tried to alert eight doctors, arrested. He even misled Beijing. All the information from that time is therefore difficult. Until now, different timelines from that period (examples here, here and here) differ on basic facts.
The seriousness of the situation was only confirmed on January 20, when dr. Zhong Nanshan, a pulmonologist sometimes referred to as “China’s Fauci”, completed his investigation and said on state television that Wuhan had a disaster in his hands; the city was closed on January 23rd.
Even during the hard closure in Hubei province, doctors were unsure about the extent of their problem. By mid-February, their PCR testing system was still so overwhelmed that they changed their case description to include diagnoses by CT scan; their number of cases increased 10 times overnight. If we are not narrow: the same thing happened in New York in March and it happens to some extent even in the United States: if you can not process PCR tests fast enough, you do not know what your case is. You fly blind. – Donald G. McNeil Jr., Scientist and Health Reporter