III: Calling Out Around the World: The Virus Goes On Tour
On January 15 2020 what the world had feared came to pass: the virus appeared in the west. The first case turned up in the USA, in Washington, where a patient who had travelled from Wuhan to Washington was found to be suffering from the symptoms and was isolated. The very next day Japan reported their first case, a man from China who, though he had not been to the market, was believed to have been a close contact of someone who was. However by this time cases had levelled off in Wuhan and the stringent restrictions were lifted. Meanwhile Thailand reported another case and in China a second death was recorded, and America began screening passengers coming in from Wuhan, although as yet no travel ban was put in place.
On January 18 a team of specialist epidemiologists arrived in Wuhan from Beijing to investigate the virus, meanwhile the city held a “super-spreader event” (another phrase 2020 brought us, and one with which we were to become tragically acquainted) for the Chinese New Year celebrations. Whether this was in defiance of the rising number of cases, in support of the official government position that there was no outbreak to worry about, or just plain ignorance and stupidity, we will never know. The official statement from the mayor remarked "The reason why the Baibuting community continued to host the banquet this year was based on the previous judgment that the spread of the epidemic was limited between humans, so there was not enough warning."But it certainly helped move the virus around, and Covid had a very happy Chinese new year. President Donald Trump, advised at this point of the situation by his Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, did not seem bothered about it. I suppose, to be fair to him and America, nobody really did. We would all learn to our costs not to be so sure of ourselves, but that was down the line.
On January 19 China woke to the scary news that the virus had been detected in people outside of Wuhan, as both Guangdong and Beijing reported cases, and one more person died, bringing the total at that point to three, with an estimated 201 cases in the country overall. The next day, as two medical staff became infected, the Chinese National Health Commission confirmed that human-to-human transmission was taking place. This was major news, and bad news too. Now it was confirmed that the virus could be passed on from person to person, the race began to create a vaccine. The first to undertake research into this was the National Institute of Health in the USA.
Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea were all now reporting cases, all of these believed related to a dinner held in a hotel in Singapore where one of the attendees was from Wuhan. Thus the virus made its way across Asia, and promptly began infecting more people. There’s nothing a virus likes to do (well, they’re not sentient but you know what I mean) more than propagate, spread and mutate as it infects, and this one was well on the way to being a major threat to Asia as well as America. It couldn’t be long before the rest of the world felt its clammy touch, and it wouldn’t be. Realising at last that they could no longer keep a lid on this, and that if they tried, they would be seen to be wilfully negligent and possibly complicit in the deaths that would surely follow, the Chinese came clean and shared their information with the world. A little late, but better late than never I guess. This was January 21. The next day the city of Wuhan was put under quarantine, but by now it was estimated that up to five million people could have travelled out of the city.
While the US embassy in China raised the Health Alert Level to 2, President Trump again shrugged it off. "It's one person coming in from China,” he said, “and we have it under control. It's—going to be just fine."
Of course, it was going to be anything but fine. More bad news was on the way. Mostly, for the first year or so, all we would get about the virus would be bad news, some of it very bad. This news told us that people who had the virus could be asymptomatic (not have or not notice symptoms) for several days before it showed, which of course meant people who thought they were perfectly healthy could be out and about and spreading the virus unknowingly before getting sick themselves. Then, those who had been infected, without knowing it, would infect others and so on. A vicious circle of infection that would be hard to stop, since nobody knew they were infected until it was too late.
We were now introduced to a new acronym, one which was to echo down the next two years across the world: PPE. PPE stands for Personal Protective Equipment, and covers gowns, masks, gloves, face shields, all the paraphernalia necessary for medical professionals to provide themselves protection from the virus, and to prevent it being passed on in the event they have been infected. On January 24 the US reported its second case while France experienced its first, the first case to be detected in Europe. The entire province of Hubei, where Wuhan is located, was put into quarantine. The next day the virus reached Australia. As the last week of January began, cases began to pile up. The USA now had five, South Korea had three, Thailand and Hong Kong reported eight. Dean of the University of Hong Kong, Gabriel Leung, predicted that the amount of cases was in fact about ten times what was being reported, reckoning that there could be up to 100,000 cases in China alone.
Canada was next to fall, then Sri Lanka and Cambodia, while Germany recorded its first case January 27, while a scare in neighbouring Austria turned out to be a false alarm. Samoa, the first country to implement mandatory quarantine for Chinese travellers, detained six people who had been stopped from entering the country. The Director-General of the WHO went to China to discuss the situation with the Chinese government. Brazil and Ecuador reported “possible” cases, as did Finland, Armenia, Georgia and the United Arab Emirates. Air Canada became the first airline to suspend all flights to China. Peter Navarro, Director of Trade and Manufacturing in the Trump administration, began to sound alarm bells, warning that the virus could infect millions of Americans and recommending all travel to China be stopped. China’s cases now numbered around 6,000.
And the virus hadn’t even got started yet.
As January wound down, the WHO declared the coronavirus a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern", advising all countries to prepare for a possible pandemic. India, the Philippines and Italy confirmed their first cases, while Vietnam now had three, while in the US the first case of person-to-person transmission, marking their sixth case overall, was reported. Azar, the CDC's Robert Redfield and National Institute of Health director Anthony Faucci, the last a name which would become synonymous with the virus, for two very different reasons, declared that a ban on travel into the USA from China should be implemented.
On January 31 the first cases were reported in the United Kingdom, Russia, Sweden and Spain. By the end of the month a total of twenty-seven countries spread across five continents had cases of the novel coronavirus.