Did the Coronavirus come from a virology lab in Wuhan?

Trump is now promoting the idea that the coronavirus originated in a virology lab in Wuhan rather than live animal markets. My reaction is, What’s the point? Even Trump doesn’t claim that China purposely spread the virus to attack the US – given the havoc the virus created within China itself, that would have been completely crazy. So imagine that there was an accident at the lab that let the virus out. That’s sad and would have turned out to be very unfortunate. But what does it make China guilty of?

A more plausible argument is to note that there were delays in China’s acknowledgement that there was a problem. Whistleblower doctors such as Wenliang Li were called in by local officials in Wuhan to stop him from spreading his findings online. This was bad – and shows a transparency problem endemic to Chinese society.

But note the timelines here. China’s response to the virus was delayed by a month compared to what would have happened had the response been immediate. Not good.
But the administration’s response to the virus – from first reports in the US and the beginning of lockdowns – took over three months, even though more was known about the virus sooner than at a similar period in China.

And when China acted they acted vigorously. One may argue about whether their measures were too draconian. But they have produced results. While our number of new cases still continues to increase, new cases in China have now disappeared. (It is possible that China has not been truthful about the number of deaths, but if there were any notable number of new cases, it is unlikely these could have been covered up. Social media posts do get deleted, but they can come from so many sources that these deletions are not immediate.)

We should not kowtow to China. We should stand up for our values. And when, for example, China practices cybertheft of US industrial secrets and blocks access to Western websites, we should be critical. But: let’s cool it about China. Shouldn’t we publicly praise their economic achievements? Or when they show restraint around the world? As unlikely as this seems for now, shouldn’t we de-escalate the rhetoric rather than ratcheting it up? Need we be enemies?

#Coronavirus #China #Trump