It’s time to get real about Covid-19 and China

It’s time to face facts about Covid-19, the lab leak blame game and real life in China. If we don’t, there is a risk that the world will stumble out of the plague years and into decades of a hot-cold conflict.

First: this was a disaster foretold. China’s markets were a virologist’s nightmare. Laboratory conditions were often basic. In a hard society, people will take risks. Bad stuff happens, the regime clamps down and covers up. It moves on.

But after 20 million deaths – that’s according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) – some politicians want to put a price on the ruin. Among them, of course, is the former US president Donald Trump. He tells his followers he will get 60 trillion dollars in reparations from China (presumably to pay for his wall out of the loose change). It’s hard to think of a more provocative idea.

Second: we have been here before. Late in 2002, I heard rumours of a mysterious pneumonia-like illness in the crowded cities of southern China. Foreigners spoke of packed hospitals and panic food buying.

On 3 January, 2003, officials denied there was an epidemic. The world’s biggest annual migration began as millions visited families over the lunar new year. On 10 February the WHO office in Beijing got an email saying a hundred people had died in a week and crowds were stripping the pharmacies bare.

The next day, local authorities admitted a new virus was causing a “severe acute respiratory syndrome”, quickly dubbed Sars. On 14 February China officially told the WHO it was under control.

Unconvinced, the WHO sent teams to Beijing. Guess what? They hit a brick wall. They were barred from talking to medics and kept out of military hospitals where Sars was rife. When they finally got in, they were forbidden to report their findings. It took two weeks for permission to go south. China delayed asking for technical help and failed to hand over data until 17 March.

Meanwhile, one of its own top doctors, Liu Jianlun, had flown to Hong Kong carrying the virus, where he became the city’s “patient zero” before dying in a hospital on 4 March. He spread Sars to others who took it to Canada, Singapore and Vietnam, where the carrier gave it to Dr Carlo Urbani of the WHO, who died. At this point, the world woke up.

I went to Guangzhou, the epicentre of the outbreak. Its main market was out of a medieval painting. Bare-handed slaughterers steamed and skinned the carcasses of dogs, pigs and cows. Blood, skin and offal were stamped into the mud, where children played, mixing with dung from ducks and chickens confined by the thousands in stacked cages.

Among them were civet cats, raccoon dogs, ferret badgers, macaques, fruit bats and snakes. The civet cats were later found to harbour a Sars virus that correlated 99.8 per cent to the human version. I watched cats thrashing and spitting as they were hauled out to be bashed to death and stuffed into sacks. Researchers found that 40 per cent of the traders tested positive for Sars antibodies, meaning they had at some point contracted the virus – although none had its flu-like symptoms, suggesting immunity.

Once the species link was proved, the Communist Party swung into gear. It banned wild animal sales, imposed border checks and ran medical tests. In the end the death toll was low, maybe 800 out of 8,000 cases, nonetheless a rate of around ten per cent. The virus ebbed until the WHO declared it “contained” on 5 July. The world was spared.

But what happened next? Not much. In December 2003 I went back to the market and found it was business as usual. The WHO only took a tough line because the woman heading it, Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, was not up for re-election and so was immune to Chinese pressure. The will to keep tabs on China ebbed after she left. And in Beijing, the WHO learned of an outbreak of Sars at the National Institute for Virology, where samples were stored. All the ingredients for a future disaster were there.

The Canadian biologist Alina Chan and the science writer Matt Ridley have ably laid out in their book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, the case that Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, although authorities say it was found in a “wet market”. After watching Sars, I have no trouble accepting that a combination of these factors was to blame.

That is not a conspiracy. Nor does it hand much ammunition to Donald Trump. But absent a whistleblower, we may never get the truth. And the WHO’s proposed new treaty is not a solution. It will not clean up south China – source of the Hong Kong flu of 1968, the Asian flu of 1957, maybe even the 1918 flu pandemic. Only development, reform – and peace – will do that.

Michael Sheridan was a founding foreign correspondent and later diplomatic editor at The Independent, and is author of The Gate to China: A New History of Hong Kong and the People’s Republic (2021)