Nothing to see: COVID origins off-limits as China's Wuhan touts recovery
07 September, 2020
The Huanan seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, believed by many to be the foundation of the COVID-19 pandemic, is sealed behind a blue perimeter fence. A big team of security staff chases away anyone who lingers.
“We are just doing our job,” said a guard in black who ordered a Reuters reporter to delete footage recorded close to the market’s main gates. He determined himself as an employee from the city government’s epidemic prevention and control team.
Foreign journalists were invited on an official tour to report on Wuhan’s efforts to rebuild its economy following the months-long trauma of COVID-19. The official message: the “heroic city” is back again to normal and back business, its schools and tourist sites reopened and its enterprises running at full capacity.
“No other place is really as safe as this,” said Lin Songtian, president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a state-backed group that helped organise the tour.
The location greater than 80% of the country’s COVID-19 deaths, the central Chinese city on the banks of the Yangtze river has reported no cases of local transmission since April, and almost all of the stringent controls imposed during a two-month lockdown have been relaxed.
But Wuhan was accused of acting too slowly in the early stages of the outbreak amid fears of disrupting the economy or displeasing China’s leadership in Beijing. Critics say media censorship and the silencing of whistleblowers gave the virus more time to spread undetected.
Wuhan remains reluctant to permit light to be shed on the origins of a pathogen which has killed practically 900,000 persons worldwide.
The town still restricts usage of locations just like the Huanan market, which was from the first determined cluster of infections in December.
At another wholesale market in the far north of city, which is open to the public, Reuters was tailed by security staff and deterred from talking with stallholders and traders.
“In the event that you don’t allow people to go to these places, you give persons the impression you have something to hide,” said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington who studies the politics behind China’s medical issues.
ORIGINS
China rejects conspiracy theories surrounding the coronavirus, including claims without evidence a consultant virology institute in Wuhan created it. But many unanswered questions remain about the origins of COVID-19 and the role played by the trade in exotic wildlife in Wuhan.
Though authorities closed the Huanan market in January, there exists a growing scientific consensus that the virus did not originate there. Some studies recommend it was already in circulation by enough time it reached the marketplace, with an increase of than one transmission route.
“I buy into the general idea that the virus jumped right into a human prior to the Wuhan market,” said David Irwin, professor of medicine and pathobiology at the University of Toronto. “They could have already been a trader that had been exposed either right to the virus in a bunch animal or interacted with farmers or other traders beyond Wuhan.”
China has demonstrated little appetite for an international enquiry into the origins of COVID-19 or for allowing more scrutiny of its efforts in the first stages of the outbreak, preferring to give attention to the country’s rapid economical and psychological recovery.
“There is absolutely no doubt that China has been very successful in containing the virus, why can’t they be more open?” said Huang. “If you wish to dispel those myths... you don’t need to worry about persons visiting the market and even the virus institute.”
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