Page 44 - April-May 2020 Neat

44 Coronavirus Ushering in a Chinese Future

Is Coronavirus Ushering

in a Chinese Future?

By David Wallace-Wells

When, at a meeting of the G7 late last month,
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo so fervently
insisted that the group refer to COVID-19 as the
“Wuhan virus” that the meeting dissolved rather
than issue even an anodyne statement of
concern, it seemed, at first blush, just another
projection of Great Power xenophobia from the
Trump administration — the U.S. trying to pin
the blame for its own evident failures on
another, more distant and more sinister enemy.

It was that. As were efforts, all the way down the
political food chain, to call the disease the
“Chinese flu.” But as the Trump administration
has intensified its project to publicly equate its
chief geopolitical rival with the devastating
disease the president has taken to calling “the
Invisible Enemy” in an effort to project a
wartime mentality, the administration hasn’t The COVID debt the world owes China is much critical public-health importance. Scott Gottlieb,
diverged quite as far from expert thinking on the deeper than that response (the Chinese didn’t the former head of the FDA and today among
invent those policies, keep in mind, though they the more credible and serious Republican voices
subject as you might think. In fact, while it’s not
quite fair to say the White House vilification of did implement them). In almost every way, our on the disease, has gone further. “China was not
experience and understanding of the disease truthful with the world at the outset of this,” he
China has dovetailed with conventional wisdom
among China watchers and global public-health was, especially in the critical early months, told CBS this past weekend. “Had they been
leaders, more and more of them have spent the refracted through a Chinese prism. To begin more truthful with the world, which would have
with, there is our collective sense of the shape of enabled them to be more truthful with
last few weeks pointing an angry, accusatory
finger at China — many of them on the right, the disease itself, and the way it can be expected themselves, they might have actually been able
to work through a given population. It is only to contain this entirely.” On Monday, Chris
yes, and many hawkish to begin with, but
nevertheless raising vital questions about what over the last few weeks that epidemiologists and Hayes tweeted, “This is a very obvious point
you could call the epistemology of COVID-19. public-health experts have begun to see and has been obvious from the beginning but as
sufficient, large-scale data on the spread of the the global picture fills in over time, there is
For a decade or so, China hawks have worried
about how the country’s inevitable-seeming rise disease outside China to make meaningful *absolutely* no fricking way China only had
inferences from it. Before that, for months, our 3300 fatalities from this virus.” It’s enough to
would reshape not just global networks but also
the experience of those living very far from basic understanding of the coronavirus and make some serious people wonder whether the
Beijing — a natural empire finding its imperial nearly all of our sense of “best practices” in account we have of the origin of the disease is
treating and containing it, came out of the credible, or whether it emerged from a lab
footing and marginalizing, finally, the United
States and the rest of the West. Most of those experience of China, and particularly Wuhan, facility (though at the moment, the somewhat
where the data seems to have been at the very plausible version of that hypothesis remains the
fantasies imagined direct confrontations and
unmistakable inflection points, but COVID-19 least massaged, and perhaps much more facility was doing proper biomedical research,
illustrates a more subtle version of that fear too. systematically laundered, past the point of not bioweapons work, as the fringier hypothesis
reliability. has it).
To a degree that can be hard to appreciate from
the sidelines, the global experience of the
At first, the reports from China were that there But our COVID debt to China goes further still
coronavirus pandemic has been to live, at least
temporarily, in a reality shaped, perhaps even was no human-to-human transmission, then, that than just bad data sets giving rise to a misleading
defined, by Chinese forces. only symptomatic patients could transmit the initial picture of the disease. The self-reported
disease. Today, the data varies from country to false-negative rate of the tests used in China is

This is not just because the disease emerged in country, but studies suggest perhaps half or 30 percent, and many of the test kits being used
more of those infected show no symptoms, and now elsewhere in the world were manufactured
China — viruses can emerge anywhere in the
world, though some places produce more than perhaps a quarter or even three-quarters of cases there, including those which Spanish, Slovakian,
others. And it is not just because the Chinese may be spread by those asymptomatic carriers. Czech, Turkish, and British doctors and
(Of course, those estimates come largely from scientists have found to be unworkably flawed.
government’s initial response was so poor, with
studies suggesting that if it had acted three Chinese data sets, as well.) The death toll in The same goes for masks and other PPE, like the
China has been reported at 3,300, though 600,000 masks the Dutch returned to China after
weeks sooner, 95 percent of the country’s cases
— and perhaps international transmission — credible analyses (broadly endorsed by the U.S. buying them — the Netherlands was deep in the
could have been avoided entirely. Because while intelligence community) suggest the numbers muck of its own pandemic but unwilling to use
might be ten times higher. The age skew looked such shoddy protection. And many of the more
the early Chinese response was negligent and
narrowly self-interested, there have been so few one way, according to the Chinese data, plausible plans for emerging from hemisphere-
suggesting that the young and middle-aged were wide lockdown depend on aggressive testing
admirable responses to the disease it is hard to
fault the first government to encounter COVID- quite safe, and quite another way in France and regimens linked to “contact tracing,” which
19 for being imperfect, especially because the Spain and the United States. And while there are would likely be aided by cell-phone location
too many confounding factors and still- data — data collected on phones manufactured
quite effective second-wave response has
formed the basis of nearly all global public- unknown aspects of the disease to attribute all of largely in China.
those differences to efforts of propaganda, it is
health action: aggressive testing, quarantining of
the sick and those interacting with them, and nevertheless fair to say, as Anthony Fauci has,
“shelter-in-place” lockdowns for everybody that the Chinese “deceived” the world by (Continued on Page 45)
providing “misinformation” on matters of
else, at least for a limited period of time.